Tolarno: Ben Quilty, The Fiji Weddings
Ben Quilty is the hottest thing right now among painting collectors. (Do go to the site, the images are very well reproduced.) The Age‘s Robert Nelson — whose opinion I often have issues with; well, everyone’s a critic — wrote a good piece on this show, noting the virtues and vices of Quilty’s method: “One could look to Quilty as rescuing painting with turbulent instinct and courageous knife…” and/but “As form that represents space, however, the painting is weak. Volume, space and texture collapse in a blur, as if there is no underlying drawing process that weighs up the values of each.” It echos what Nelson wrote about Quilty nine years ago: “He tosses around thick paint on a large scale, with the kind of vigour in the medium that you might associate with abstract painting … As paint, it’s impressive; but as flesh or hair it’s compromised.” I admire Quilty’s facility but I think Nelson is right; his style has vim, but no rigour. Till June 1.

Heide: Fiona Hall, Big Game Hunting
Fiona Hall must be one of the most interesting and conceptually interesting artists. Her new show at Heide has alot to do with ecological and biosphere damage, and as usual she rounds up a kaboodle of materials and approaches — cloth and found stuff and bark paper painting and object vitrines — for a dense gallery experience in low lighting. There are messages, maybe too many, but it’s an impressive show — even if I’m a little reluctant to give in to its messaginess. Anyway, it looks great. Till 21 July.

Niagara: Tony Bevan, Recent Works
Tony Bevan is big in the UK, and elsewhere, and pretty much unknown here. This show of recent charcoal/oil paintings is a good chance to see his remarkable, stylised work. Spare but gutsy, zennish but earthy, awkward but beautifully drawn, plain but itching to sublime. The sheer amount of charcoal on his canvases is amazing especially in his Self Portrait PC1218, below. Charcoal is deep and dark and it does something paint cannot; it’s chthonic, and fragile.  And you can tell by the prices he is a Big Name ($90K for a largish picture). Till 1 June.

Edmund Pearce: Konrad Winkler, Moments Of My Life
A photography show I really enjoyed is on at the dedicated photographer gallery Edmund Pearce. (I made it late to the Robert Rooney’s The Box Brownie Years at CCP or I would have sent you there too; a great show). Konrad Winkler does something very simple to his photos which has a profoundly transformative effect. He has chosen pictures from times and people in his life and printed them up floating in a big white surface with intimately sized text printed by the side of the image — it’s not wall text; you are compelled to read it, and read the picture against it, and test the text against the picture.

You can see them on the website but it doesn’t make clear how unexpected a move this is. It has a lot to do with scale — with the size of the pictures which are large at 72 cm x 90 cm, and how the images and text are modestly sized within this area. To double this intimacy, the text that Winkler has provided has a superbly conversational style as if the artist were dropping an anecdote in your ear. It’s the kind of mood compression that poets take a lifetime to hone. Interestingly, in the one piece of actual “wall” text in the showWinkler suggests that the textual component may be even more important than the image, but I don’t think so. Somehow the push-pull between word and image and space has attained exactly the right tension, and the stories and feelings in the pictures bloom into a warmth that very few phtographic exhibitions ever afford. Till June 1.

NGV: Mix Tape 1980s: Appropriation, Subculture, Critical Style
Oops, that’s it, I’ve run out of time. Go see it just for the fun of looking back. If I had to take away five things they would be Paul Boston’s Fish House, an enormous wall papier mache sculpture; Juan Davila’s wicked and scabrous Rat Man; Micky Allan’s photo series Botany Bay Today; and first of all Leigh Bowery’s amazing and hilarious and funny larger than life costume, The Metropolitan. (I know, I’ve forgotten one piece.) Till 1 Sept.

Anna Krien’s Night Games was excerpted in the Good Weekend and last night she appeared at the Wheeler Centre speaking with Helen Garner. The topic of sportsmen and “sex, consent and power” drew a chockablock packed house; clearly it’s so hot right now. The beaming father, Peter K, was on hand to snap pictures of the crowd, and his daughter on stage.

I’m guessing some of the audience was there as I was, more interested in the two women on stage talking about the subject at hand, than the subject itself. The event (to me, need I add) was a romancing of a certain kind of long-form reportage by a female author. The flaming quill handed down to Janet Malcolm, to Helen Garner, to Anna Krien.

Words:

Garner : “One of the things I love about this book is the anxiety — a fruitful anxiety — a high anxiety — I approve of it.”

Krien: “There is a grey zone between rape and consent. The more I spoke [to people] the more it was affirmed.”

Krien had a neologism describing how men feel pressured by their peers; “I was hoping to coin a new word: dickwhipped.” Garner, hand to forehead, smiled unreceptively. At another point Krien reminded Garner how wild her 60s generation had been, “You used to take sugar cubes dipped in acid!” Garner laughed, “I had it on blotting paper.”

Krien: “Men treating women like shit, and women allowing themselves to be treated like shit. There is a glacier space between these two things.”

An older woman in the audience, identifying with Garner’s generation, made a problematic implication with the assertion that “Things were much simpler in our day.” At which Garner said, very drily, “Were they?”

Krien, on the lack of a common, or open, language between the sexes: “Should he be an interpreter of smiles?”

Krien had earlier talked about her seeming sympathy during the trial to the alleged rapist, Justin. At the end she said, “I know Justin does not want this book to come out. He’s put it behind him.” Garner responded immediately: “That gives me a kind of rage.” To which Krien responded, as if surprised, “Does it?”

That “Does it?” sort of amazes me.

Large numbers of folk, kids, dogs, were strolling around poking in bins of books and chugging coffee in the street, staying away from the chill shadows (Constant Gardener, who had chosen to visit an Open Garden in Mt Macedon, said it was 8C there at noon). According to Three Thousand 60 booksellers had come to squat in various shops around town, attracting up to 15,ooo visitors. More amazing to me is that this tiny place — we had to park a long way from town centre; it took us two whole minutes walking to arrive at CBD — supports eight bookshops year round.

There were some very good specialist secondhand/rare booksellers but on the whole it was a bit like a Sunday market, with books instead of clothes/knicknacks. What sets it apart is their tw0-day literary program (Festival Director is Stephen Samuel, download program from their very basic site) which this year included sessions on book collecting, publishing opps for young writers, talks by Kate Grenville and Ramona Koval, a reviewing workshop with Peter Rose, editor of ABR, poetry and story readings and three sessions on how to draw manga.

Hi- and Lo-lites: Pizza and Nagobs

My main negative observation is that the literary stuff happened in the Wesley church, a block away from the main action; it diffuses the focus. It’d be great if they could have it in the splendid town hall, which housed several book stalls, and on stage the lovely book sculptor, Nicholas Jones, (picture) who was carving live, as it were. But despite all the seductive offerings (I bought two books about books) the almost highlight of the day was the woodfired pizza from the pop-up in the middle of the street. It was remarkably good, on par with the best I’ve had in Fitzroy or Nth Carlton. Take note: it was an outpost from The Forge Pizzeria in Ballarat. And their order tickets were great too: we were called up as Nick Cave and Robert Downey Jr. The lowlight (prejudice alert) was the nagob* school band, a bunch of uniformed kids delivering an excruciating public musical performance. (* “Nagob”: reverse Bogan — preening, self-satisfied, and mostly middle class.)

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Philosophy rant: What is a book cover for?

The rest of this post may be of interest to the design cognoscenti; anyone else please feel free to skip away.

One of the reasons I was in Clunes was to take part in a panel discussion, “The Art of Book Design” — with friends and design colleagues Josh Durham (designer of Carrie Tiffany’s Mateship with Birds), who also designed the Festival’s delightful book-cupid’s arrow symbol, and Sandy Cull (designer of Hannah Kent’s hot buzz Burial Rites).

Towards the end of the hour, our clever moderator Sam Cooney (of The Lifted Brow among other things) asked the simple and curly questions, What is a book cover for? What is your philosophy of book covers?

Josh, playing hardcore: To sell books.

Me, plaintive: Really, is that all? Isn’t there something richer than that?

Josh: You’re kidding yourself…

Me, deep breath: Okay, I’m going on a rant here.

You say it’s about selling books. Of course it is. In a supermarket you see aisles of items packaged to catch the eye. In a bookstore there are shelves of books doing the same thing. But it’s not truly analogous. A book is a cultural object profoundly embedded in our intellectual history. With books the readers, the consumers if you like, will tolerate something more. Intanglibles like the expression of beauty or power or emotion; they may even expect and demand it.

And it is in that gap between utility and the intangible that the designer can take on the mantle of the artist to interpret the text. To express the book’s beauty or power or emotion. And that’s when designers not only pay their dues, but get to sing the blues.

(PAUSE, in which people are gobsmacked by the eloquence, or are silently rolling their eyes.)

Sandy, nodding: Yes, I agree with that, I think publishers ask me because they want my interpretation of the book. I feel the work is very personal.

Me, seeing an opportunity: And that’s the thing about “selling,” about commerce; we don’t know what it is that makes people buy. Whether they are moved by colours, or the image of a beautiful face, or a landscape that reminds them of their childhood. If we knew how to design a book so it sells like a blockbuster, all books would look like that.

Thankfully, we wrapped up soon after with a couple of remarks from the floor, including from a would-be self-publishing author who said that our talk was an “affirmation” of her intent to control absolutely the design of her to-be book. You can never win…

Contemporary Lady, Traditional Lady

The website offers this information: “Aside from the racing, the Marriott Hotel Fashions on the Field turns a lot of heads. There are four categories, Contemporary Lady, Traditional Lady, Most Spectacular Hat and Best Dressed Gent.” Alas I didn’t get to see who won what as we were in another part of the grounds when the parading happened, but we saw some of the tastiness on display. Lots of feathers, and men of a certain age wearing hats. I rather enjoyed the black and white duo.

The Wheelie Waste Grand Annual

As for the main event, the delightfully, officially titled “The Wheelie Waste Grand Annual Steeplechase” — it was a gas; exciting and eventful. We had bet on a tip (ha ha ha!) — Daffer, who didn’t even get close — and climbed up the splendid western grassy knoll for the view. It’s useful to be quite high as the 5.5km course is widespread.

And it is most unusual: first the horses run anti-clockwise for a circuit and then take a jump on the way out of the racecourse across a road and up some fields to the top of a rise before crossing the road again and coming down to take an extreme right dink into the final turn and home straight. There are 33 (!) jumps along the way; there used to be 34 but they removed the last jump as they didn’t want the crowd to be traumatised by a fall on the final stretch (– the jumping/falling potential being the reason why my ancient father-in-law is so against the race).

Oddly enough, M__ was pointing at the jump just before The End of Time (last in line) lost its rider.

Falling off the End of Time

In yesterday’s Grand Annual a rider fell off The End of Time at the jump before the first road crossing. I had never seen a steeplechase before and — seeing that no harm had come to the jockey — I was utterly charmed by The End of Time chasing and tailing the field as they thundered up the rise. Also, as M__ remarked to me, there’s proof: if horses didn’t like running and jumping that horse wouldn’t still be racing by itself. The pack crossed the road again and came down the rise on an angle for the jump and that final acute turn — at which Cash Advance lost its rider. Obviously Cash Advance wanted to keep going left rather then the hard right back to the last leg, and as they leapt the jockey went one way and the horse the other. So we saw Cash Advance gallop off into the south-east trailed by The End of Time. Hijinks!

“He’s not a very good horse.”

The winner was Banna Strand who has had a chequered history here, as we learn in the cheerful story (worth reading in its entirety; its tone is so unhomogenised) in the Warrnambool Standard.

Until Banna Strand took the lead in the last strides of the gruelling race yesterday, the Kiwi jumper had been known more for his leap over a perimeter fence at Tozer Road and into the crowd before racing down residential streets than for any deeds on the track.

The Standard also deliciously quotes the trainer John Wheeler: “This race is the only race in Australia that really suits him. He’s a dead-set steeplechaser, old-fashioned type who keeps plodding away. He’s not a very good horse. He’s never won a flat race.”

Day Three at Warrnambool May Racing Carnival: elegant and swellegant, and even more fun than the Avoca ANZAC Day Races.

and “Not to put too fine a point on it / Say I’m the only bee in your bonnet.”

The first rhyme is from Doctor Worm: “I like to play the drums, I think I’m getting good, But I can handle criticism”; the second from Birdhouse in your Soul, both also song titles to treasure.

They were written by the two Johns (Flansburgh and Linnell) of They Might Be Giants, indie since 1982. I loved their second and third albums, Lincoln (named for their hometown) and Flood, and was disappointed by their fourth, Apollo 18, which was in … 1992. I did see them when they came out a dozen years ago, and I think it was fine but not memorable. I had anticipatory doubts but last night the Corner in Richmond they were utterly winning.

A packed standing crowd, I’m guessing 85% men and 100% geek. Specs, caps and college gear, thirty-, forty- and fiftysomething. The Johns are in their early 50s though they present at least ten years younger. Constant Gardener arrived late from yoga as John F was doing a robot joke routine through a robotic mike filter … Robots tell infallible jokes … in comedy they call this a thinker … I don’t want to spoil it. Here it is: What has eight arms and kills its girlfriend? … Squid Vicious. [drum splat]

(The phrase Undergrad Baroque crossed my mind as a description odf their mode but that suggests smartarserry; TMBG shares a crtain obliqueness if not opacity, but theirs is a shining wit.)

The reason I had doubts is I am not familiar with any of their last 20 years work apart from their delightful theme for Malcolm in the Middle (Boss of Me). And theirs are lyrics you need to have read on the page to “hear” when sung (like many bands I guess, except the wordplay is so intense it’d be a loss not to get it). But they surprised me with their verve: they rocked. Natural tunesmiths and extremely clever with their tempo and beats they had the nerdy crowd jigging and yelling. They would be pop kings except for their brains: too big.

People! People! People! . . . Apes! Apes! Apes!

No point talking about their songs, but look up Anna Ng and Birdhouse, if you are not familiar, both of which they played (though you will need the lyric sheet: Anna Ng‘s are remarkable). What they also did was to play with the crowd. At one point John F (the one with glasses and beard) pointed a flashlight into the crowd to divide us for a competition. At a signal he had one side pumping their right arms and shouting: People! People! People! The other side alternately raised left arms and shouted: Apes! Apes! Apes! At the end John F proclaimed the winners to be … “People!” And adding, “It was fixed!”

Their relation to the crowd is fantastic. They put on a Show. It was Great.

Tour dates. In Bendigo!

Picture: On the podium, Stella chair Aviva Tuffield; left, Fairfax’s Jason Steger; in the turquoise necklace, shortlistee Michelle de Kretser; right, bookseller Will Heyward.

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin

It’s a question that’s been addressed incessantly since the Stella was announced and was also answered in passing by a judge on the panel, Kerryn Goldsworthy, the guest speaker, Helen Garner, and the winner herself, Carrie Tiffany. But the answer is in the numbers, and is implicit in the name of the prize and its catalyst counterpart. Austtralia’s most prestigious writing prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, was named in honour of the author of My Brilliant Career (1901), who felt she had to suppress her gender specific given names to be taken seriously. In the 55 years of the Miles, only nine women have won it. As last night’s winner put it, the Stella reclaims Franklin’s female authorship.

A $10,000 Gesture

The stop-the-press moment was when Carrie Tiffany announced in her acceptance speech that she was giving away $10,000 of her $50,000 prize to her fellow five shortlisters. She said: “This in some way reflects that the Stella is an opportunity to do something differently … I’ve experienced tremendous generosity and support from women in Australian publishing and literature; it’s a way of honouring the many rather than the few.’’ For a writer (average income of authors: $11,000 a year) that is a breathtaking bit of generosity. Money buys time — Tiffany said with understated grace, if I can hasten their work, why wouldn’t I?

In her speech Tiffany also thanked many women writers whose sentences had helped her form her own. And the judge Kerryn Goldsworthy acknowledged and thanked four legends of Australian writing, sine qua non: publishers Hilary McPhee and Diana Gribble (McPhee Gribble 1975-1989), and two of their authors, Helen Garner and Drusilla Modjeska.

Picture: Winner Carrie Tiffany, for Mateship with Birds, talking with guest speaker, Helen Garner, left.

Garner: The Pain of Competition

Helen Garner’s guest speech included an excellent piece of confessional in which she explained how bad it felt to be be shortlisted and not win, including a painfully, hilariously embrarrassing episode from her distant past. Garner attended an award night with newly, naively bought high heels — she thought she had a good chance. Naive because she didn’t realise the winner would have been advised, hilarious and embarrassing because she admitted how she wondered through the dinner if she could manage the heels as she walked up on to the stage. Painful as she told how she put on her good loser’s face, beaming a sincere smile of congratulations at the winner.

And how, when she first started writing non-fiction, she was no longer considered for awards, and how she felt when she saw her award-absence in the papers — her “guts fell down an elevator shaft.” It was a great, typical Garner* move: telling small-scale, humiliating personal anecdotes that illuminate the depth of vulnerabilities we all possess.

A Lose-Win Prize

I had a conversation with the author Jacinta Halloran, shouting at each other over the hubbub — we agreed with Garner’s observation that only time can tell which works last, but that we can train a spotlight onto what we think is good right now. And that, with its gender specificity, the day that the Stella Prize is put out of business is a day when women writers can also fully celebrate. And last night’s celebrations were a fine start to that end.

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*Garner footnote: On the theme of the feminine ghetto Garner jokingly observed that in the future perhaps a book by a woman, even a novel about death, wouldn’t need to sport a “vase of flowers” on the cover. She meant her novel, The Spare Room, the cover of which featured a painting by moi. As I said, she had cast nasturtiums on me; and I pedantically reminded her that it was not a vase, but a cup.

A few years ago cutting edge muso Matthew Herbert was invited by granddaddy Deutsche Grammophon to “recompose” Mahler’s last, 10th Symphony. That wrenching work was never finished, and Herbert’s enterprise superimposes on, and interrupts the first movementwith a swathe of sound samples, including “a lone violist playing at Mahler’s grave, sampled birds near Mahler’s home in Toblach, Italy, and … the symphony through speakers sealed inside a cardboard coffin.”

I find it a fascinating piece. Something complicated is going on and it is both responsive to the original and also utterly radical; iconoclastic would be the word except Herbert is not driven by fear or hate. (A snippet of the recomposition. See Herbert speak on this.)

A Roomful of Music Made from the Music Made in the Room

Last Monday night (8 April) Herbert presented the premier of a commissioned work, One Room: Made of Music. The title is very specific: the hour-long piece was all about the room in which it was played: with four players leaning into their instruments/computers, Herbert produced a room-sized collage of sound made from samples of recordings from previous performances in the auditorium. Woven into this is drum and piano playing a score derived (how!) from the Hoop Pine of which the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall is made. Sounds wild? Sounded wild. But it’s not aleatoric, Herbert played to a plan.

(After thoughts: Herbert has a great faith in “documentary” sounds, and in its genii loci — I am not fully convinced about that effect. If you hear a recording of a tree falling in a forest, you can’t necessarily tell if it’s happening in an endangered environment or just in a plantation. That is, you need wall text.)

Herbert and his troupe walked onto the stage dressed like five waiters at a not so great Italian restaurant: creased white shirts with rolled sleeves, black bowties (I suspect pre-tied) and black trousers. Geek chic. Herbert, with his impressive cranium and bad teeth, has aged into a prettier Colm Toibin (hmm). As Constant Gardener observed, Everyone else in the room looks like they have a postdoc in music. (The young man next to me demurred that his PhD was in anthropology: his thesis was on Nicaragua — Politics, see, he said, and pointed to the program notes which reminded us of how Herbert embraces politics as a part of his music. (Check here: “When everything I read politically and watch and hear has been absorbed, there comes a point where you must feel it viscerally…”)

A Revolution in Music: “I feel like a documentary maker”

The work is extremely hard to describe — an unpredictable hour of cascading sounds and samples. It is not surprising that Herbert gave a “very long preamble”. It was the kind of work for which reading the wall text is a prequisite to enagagement, never mind enjoyment.

In a recent issue of the New Yorker, an elderly, old-style French chef dryly remarked about his customers that “I don’t want them to be impressed; I want them to be pleased.” But with Herbert the intellectual response is part of the pleasure. It’s as with so many Modernist works — they are a difficult pleasure, and the pleasure cannot be extracted from the difficult. And a good part of the pleasure-thrill is when we go “Aha!” — when we finally get Cezanne’s Bathers, or Eliot’s  The Waste Land, or Godot, or Cage’s 4’33″. And with Cage we see how new music has come about. We have been prepared by late Beethoven (Piano Sonata 32, the Grosse Fuge), by the Dadaists (I think Herbert’s piece sounds like how a Schwitters collage looks; or this one) and Schoenberg through to John Cage.

John Cage, 1991: “When I hear what we call music, it seems to me that someone is talking. And talking about his feelings, or about his ideas of relationships. But when I hear traffic, the sound of traffic—here on Sixth Avenue, for instance—I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking. I have the feeling that sound is acting. And I love the activity of sound [...] I don’t need sound to talk to me.”

Matthew Herbert, 2012: “With regard to sound, the first thing everyone does is shut the world out in a recording studio, put cloth on the walls, sponge on the ceiling. I made a deal with myself a few years ago to only record outside the studio, to go out into the world. It changed everything and had a huge impact. There’s a fundamental revolution in music in that it’s now a documentary when for four million years it was impressionism. It used to be that if I wanted to write a piece of music about this cup of tea I’d have to imitate it and describe how I felt about it through musical metaphor. Now I can take the sound of the tea spoon and pouring and make a piece of music out of it. I feel like a documentary maker, it’s about bearing witness … Mahler is a good example. If you go to his hut the first thing you hear is pigs. The guy who’s responsible for maintaining it can’t afford to so he sticks farm animals round it and you have to pay to see the pigs to visit Mahler’s hut. Secondly there’s the road, a big one with traffic noise that wasn’t there when Mahler was. He went there because he wanted silence. That immediately tells you something. It unlocks whole levels and layers of stories you never would by sitting at home.”

Post-melody: Life, and Death — a Bomb, a Pig

So that’s what we are listening to. The ongoing revolution in music. I don’t quite know what to think about it, or how I feel. But it is intensely interesting, and it has nothing to do with melody, at all. It’s like very stylish doodling, which takes a kind of talent, and it also feels like something on the way somewhere, a point on a journey. (Herbert still makes music with melodies, and dance music.) Now we have a moment when we think about the music we hear, parse the texture and patterns, and the concerns that the documented sounds bring up. The NYT reviewer writes that “literalism does not equal simplicity.” It’s worth pondering. In Herbert’s case, documentary-based music is complicated; but its literal nature, its sampling, is inserting an explicit text in music, a medium which used to be the epitome of the abstract, and so often a sensual seduction beyond words.

Which is why his performance on Friday night (12 April) promises a lot — in The End of Silence, Herbert will take a ten second recording made by photographer Sebastian Meyer during a battle in Libya in 2011: the sound of a pro-Gadaffi plane approaches, a warning whistle, a shout … a bomb. Herbert will make an hour of music out of this.

And on Saturday (13 April), One Pig is the notorious and provocative work in which “Herbert tells the life story of a pig from birth through to the dinner plate through its sounds, with instruments made from the pig itself and Jesse Gerner, Head Chef of The Aylesbury Bar and Restaurant in Melbourne who will be cooking live on stage.”

I look forward to the squealing on both nights.

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Reviewing the Age review

On reading the printed review of One Room in the Age, 10 April, by Martin Duffy (can’t find it on the website), Constant Gardener wondered if we had been to the same concert. I’ll repeat that the piece is extremely hard to describe, and no doubt problematic to “review”.

Duffy writes: “… Commissioned to celebrate the Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, the world premiere of [Herbert's] One Room: Made of Music failed to deliver on its vaunted hype … [The] piece takes inspiration from previous concerts at the venue and music generated from a complex analysis of the wood (see above) … Small fragments of mostly unrecognisable sound — including applause and unwanted coughing — are sampled from the hall’s archival recordings and provide the building blocks of melodic and structural material.

The bleak opening 40 minutes was a slow journey, bereft of any discernible structure and with the audience mostly excluded from the quintet’s intense internal dialogue.

Curiously for a piece intended to celebrate the hall’s acousitic properties, it failed to sonically exploit or engage spatially with them in any meaningful way.” End review.

Everyone one’s a critic and every critic is entitled to her opinion. But let me pick away:

– “failed to deliver on its vaunted hype” — How is this remark really germane to a work’s quality? Especially seeing that a lot of this “hype” arrived courtesy of the organ in which Duffy filed his review.

– “The bleak opening 40 minutes was a slow journey” — Opening! 40 minutes is two thirds of the piece. In my humble opinion (and Constant Gardener’s) it didn’t feel “slow”. But then I feel a lot of country and western pop is “slow”.

– “bereft of any discernible structure” — Well, alright. I used the word “unpredictable” above, but that is only because this is a first encounter. I am sure further listening will reveal shapes that may not be fully understood at a premiere. Herbert is a trained musician to his earlobes and toetips. I’m pretty confident he knows all about structure.

– “the audience mostly excluded from the quintet’s intense internal dialogue.” — Truly! Unlike the MSO playing a popular Mozart work whose members look up shyly at the audience to beam a grin and a wave…? But what great antenna Duffy has to sense that the audience was mostly excluded…

– “it failed to sonically exploit or engage spatially with them in any meaningful way.” — I have no idea what Duffy is suggesting. Does he wish for BIG sounds? For a drummer to march up and down the aisles demonstrating the sonic efficacy of the hall’s design? For my part the hall seemed full of sonic interest — this is the music of sound.

My young anthropologist neighbour cheerfully bade goodbye, saying: “Interesting. Pretty much what I imagined. See you later in the week for the other two shows.” The crowd gave a hearty round of applause at the end, as did we. And we talked about it all the way back to the car. It was a good night.

Shepparton Art Museum (sam): The Golden Age of Colour Prints

7 March–2 June: In her catalogue introduction gallery director Kirsten Paisley describes the outrageous fortune — timing, climate event — that allowed this group of late 18th century Japanese woodblock prints to show in Australia. What a coup! The pictures, drawn from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, were previously on tour in Japan, and now occupy the ground floor exhibition space of sam.

The works are superlative — they make a graphic impact from a distance and yield the most wonderful details up close, and it’s the kind of show where you can really inspect the pictures. There is a bunch of images from the great Utamaro, but then, the three artists  here — Utamaro, Kinoya and Sharaku, and some of their contemporaries, all seem great. It reminded me of looking at Leonardo or Ingres, in a way — you know they have reached a pitch of perfection, and somehow, over the years, the technical knowledge has been lost.

My friend H said, These are really good, anyone can see they are beautiful. One could go into specific fascinations, like how Sharaku’s depictions of “larger middle-aged” male actors in drag depend on certain details — chin, mouth — to indicate their sexuality, no mean feat in depictions as refined and reductionist as these. And that brilliant contrast they achieve in extremely fine lines (how did they cut them?!) and large blocks of colour, the contrast in scale between elements in the background and foreground, the ingenuious composition and groupings that often amalgamate several figures into a single shape, the extraordinary invention with patterns and lines. Reproduction can never do these details justice — the paper surface really counts. But perhaps it is better to simply say that these works are undeniable: Anyone can see they are beautiful.

Bendigo Gallery has managed to make itself a destination with the Grace Kelly show (and V&A fashion collection and Hollywood photos and its Drawing Prize) — at a 1:45 drive, it’s only 20 minutes closer to Melbourne than Shepparton. (From sam to Sydney Rd, Fawkner took just 2 hrs.) If you’re going to spend a bit of time going to see something good, this is the show. (And you can also see sam‘s permanent collection of art groovers.) The catalogue is excellent, with a useful essay from Wayne Crothers, curator of Asian Art at the NGV and large reproductions of the prints. Bargain-priced at $22. The exhibition tickets are $12 or $8 conc.

Art Gallery of Ballarat: Got the message? 50 years of political posters

2 March–14 April: This is a fine, large and comprehensive show of posters — international and local, historic (Vietnam war) to current issues. Talk about graphic impact, and wit. If there is ever a place for political correctness, this is it. But dull it ain’t. Entry is free and the accompanying catalogue is sensational, incorporating fold out posters. Cheap at about $40. (For a contrast, see the Polish Poster Art show at Melbourne Uni’s Ian Potter Museum. Gorgeous and sly and subversive — politics posing as culture.) Note: the gallery site has no permalink to the show.

Mornington Peninsula Regional Gallery (MPRG): Landscape of longing: Shoreham 1950–2012

27 February–21 April: ‘If anything terrible happened in my life, this is the place I would like to go. This is an exhibition about that sort of place in our lives’. A remarkable family art show — Hal Hattam; Katherine Hattam; William Mackninnon. Three generations of painters looking at Shoreham on the peninsula. There is longing in these pictures, a sense of the beach as a retreat in Australian lives. A place of nostalgia, a place where memories are made. There is a reason madeleines are shaped like seashells. Mackinnon has a very large painting of the road looking down to the peninsula by night, black and flickering with light-dots, spacious and alluring and mysterious. It has been acquired by the State Library, which collects scenes of Melbourne. A very appropriate choice. If you’re going down that way, this show is a perfect distraction. Free entry. Alas no catalogue, but you can see an illuminating video of the 2nd and 3rd generation artists — above: Mackinnon and K. Hattam discssuing Hal’s pictures. Note: the gallery site has no permalink to the show.

 In Tasmania: TMAG and MONA

If you’re in Tassie check out the newly refurbished Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery; very MONA-influenced layout and display. And see a show by Ray Arnold, one of our best printmakers — showing large prints of Tasmanian lanscapes, and politics too.

And at MONA, the last weeks of Theatre of the World (till 8 April). Some wonderfully peculiar things there and I don’t just mean David Walsh.

Pre-loved Art Auction

Works from the collection of the late Colin Laverty will be auctioned in Sydney 24 March. Currently on view in Melbourne 15-17 March. Years ago I visited the Lavertys’ house in Balmain, a large modern building on the water’s edge. I had tagged along with a gallerist friend. Their main living area was a stupendous  cave of treasures — hung salon-style to the ceiling with paintings. And built into one wall was a series of gallery racks — like a painting compacta. Their collection was wide, varied and evidently bought with an engaged interest, with an especial eye for Aboriginal works. This auction features “contemporary Australian art.”

From the collection: one of the best Larwills I’ve seen, Tribal 1983

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Two more weeks to catch Jeffrey Smart

Ends April 1, no joke. The Smart show at Tarrawarra is tight little survey packed with very good work. It includes what is probably his last major piece, Labyrinth, painted in 2011 when Smart was 90; it’s a poignant final gesture. I mentioned the show to an artist the other day who is working on her PhD. She shocked me by asking how was Smart important to Australian art history. I may not be a big fan of Smart but his oeuvre is of a quality (surely) beyond dispute. He worked away at achieving what Robert Nelson calls “the authority of figuration” in a time when that approach was fully out of fashion. And he has achieved what very few artists do: colonise a space or a place. We all know what Smartland looks like — the geometry of the industrial-urban unexpectedly become poetry. Only a tiny number of groovy contemporary artists here will leave a mark as distinct or distinctive as Smart’s. It’s a good show, worth the drive.

From the show: Labyrinth 2011

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Fred Williams at Niagara

A singular chance to see landscapes made by Fred Williams in his great flowering, 1957-1960, when he arrived back from London. Widow Williams, Lyn, is astutely and loyally showing the group at Niagara before it disperses into disparate homes and institutions. I understand the Williams show at Fed Square wasn’t a huge hit last year but if you like the idea of Australian landscape painting this show is essential. Until 23 March.

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Cloud Atlas, Cloud Nine, or at least Eight

Why have the critics been so ambivalent about and confused by Cloud Atlas? A friend picked this movie as the longest time we could stay out of the sun for the price of a ticket. The 172 minutes whizzed by and the three of us enjoyed it immensely. The exposition of the multiple strands emerged from complexity into a lucid jigsaw, and if it didn’t move us to weepy depths, it was expansive and exhilirating and funny and had many moments of persuasive feeling. A future cult hit — it will accommodate repeated viewings. I look forward to the next encounter whenever serendipity allows. I might even read the book.

Posh English child whose ancestors date back to the Norman Conquest is sexually abused by his father, becomes a teenage heroin addict, decides to kill himself if he doesn’t finish his novel (at 28), and has his family home given away by his dying mother. Swapping therapy for writing he channelled it all into the five acclaimed Patrick Melrose novels. I guess that explains briefly why I have not and don’t care to read the books.

But I counted fourteen friends and acquaintances at the Wheeler Centre last night, where St Aubyn talked about his life and art to a full house. I was there because Constant Gardener is a big fan; St Aubyn is: “sharp, incisive, bitter and very funny; among the funniest books I have read.” In the event St Aubyn’s languorous ease carried the willing crowd without any help from the somewhat overwhelmed interviewer. (I found it excruciating: but that was from trying to suppress a hacking, unshakeable cough.) You can hear St Aubyn’s low, lulling tones on Late Night Live.

St Aubyn at the Wheeler:

Fiction over memoir: It’s [about] what tradition has impressed and moved you most.

I’m rather keen on telling the truth. Why should I regret it?

I was trying to understand a mystifying situation … I was actually discovering the truth at the same time as the reader.

With tragic characters, they have a lucidity (like Hamlet).

Those are the only things worth writing about — impossible things. It had to seem very nearly impossible to do it to be worthwhile.

Dialogue is written down once but everything else is written again and again until it sounds natural. There’s no point writing down what people actually say, how they actually talk. (This sounds contradictory, but isn’t: his “dialogue” is not reportage.)

Some people don’t need to change. They’re already nice.

Quoting advice: “The function of style is interest.”

On his style: I used to sound out the sentences, I was a painfully slow reader. Maybe I imagine my sentences read out?

On reading: I decide very early if I like it, within 2o pages. Once I commit I’m carry on doggedly. (He remarked about the satisfaction of throwing a book across a room, like a frisbee.)

I just finished a novel a week ago. I wondered if I could enjoy myself writing   — the answer is, Not entirely.

Audience member: Did you get help (therapy)?
St Aubyn: I don’t think that is a literary question.
Audience: You don’t have to answer it.
St Abyn: I know.

On children speaking: They see everything for the first time and if they can articulate it, it’s amazing. But … you don’t want to make a cult of it because they’re often boring and limited.

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When I expressed my agnosticism after the show, I had three people pressing me to convert, to read his books. Patrick Melrose/St Aubyn is a fabulous creature, no doubt; he has his cult. Got the taste? — the English have done sterling interviews with “Teddy”: Telegraph; Guardian; Independent.