Louisa goes to Court

Louisa 2 was unveiled at the Supreme Court, Melbourne, last Friday and there she will stay, not because she's been naughty but because she's got an important job to do. The idea of sculpture performing roles is not new, in fact it's almost as old as civilization, it may have gone a little out of vogue in recent times, but from my perspective this is the best reason for public art.

The court can be a stressful place and Louisa's role will be to help calm people. A courtyard has been renovated with the aim of providing people with a quiet, possibly meditative space; the sculpture's purpose is to act as a focus for this. The bluestone "benches" on either side may not the world's most comfortable seats but they do offer people the chance to sit with Louisa rather than entirely on their own. I think Louisa will be a good listener.

Whilst this is not a sculpture depicting justice, the fact that it is in a court will mean that she is unlikely to avoid being compared with the tradition of portraying justice as blind folded (to aid impartiality) and carrying scales (to weigh argument) and a double edged sword (to dish out punishment). A fairly fierce representation guaranteed to communicate the power of the courts to all.

Louisa does not symbolise power, she's human, caring and considerate.

When I told the model for this work, Louisa Waters, that she'd be going to court, she said, "Hmm I've never seen myself as being completely legal - but then again my star sign is Libra".

Rembrandt self-portrait with Leica M9

A friend on the Leica M9 forum (luf) sort of brought up the question of what makes Rembrandt great, the answer I posted follows......................

As for Rembrandt and what makes him great, easy answer - he invented the M9 of his day and used his Noctilux wide open - his was better than ours because it could focus on both near things and far things simultaneously and could infinitely vary the bokeh. Nice tool eh? He also had low light nailed! But in truth those things, fabulous as they may be, aren't the half of it, top of the list in the intangible category is his ability to create something that reminds viewers of what it means to be human. Next would be that he invented a way to show the core values of the society he lived in by democratising both subjects and composition. In the end art is just the human expression of what it means to be alive now, and as NOW is always changing art just follows suit. Contrary to popular myth no artist has ever been ahead of their time. A few have been deluded And poor old Rene takes the cake - no wonder he looks so sad!

Twentysix Gasoline Stations for Sale

Endless Present

Robert Rooney and Conceptual Art

Adverts for this exhibition made my old memory race as some years ago when I was teaching at GIAE (Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education) The Head of the Art theory department gave me the little set of Artist Books pictured above, evidently the library was clearing out dross, he'd been given them, wasn't interested in them and passed them on to me.

I located them all on one of my bookshelves coincidentally squeezed between Micheal Foucault's This is not a Pipe and Bernard Berenson's Seeing and Knowing which made me think that maybe I had been cataloguing all the loony stuff together! That's hardly fair, but I kind of have the right to say that, as I started off making an art that later was called Conceptual. Patrick McCaughy called it "Duchampian".

Whilst Foucault's views and the conceptual items gained currency the Berenson essay, first published in 1949, was dismissed and ridiculed as just an outburst of a bitter old Renaissance scholar. He did say that there is no such thing as abstract art because abstract means idea, the very opposite of a tangible thing like a painting or a sculpture. By his logic he would have said that the only abstract art was what was called conceptual. This essay has haunted me for much of my life as I've never found a way to beat it. Should be compulsory reading.

Anyway - I don't know what Twentysix Gasoline Stations are worth, or Sunset strip for that matter, or the other items, but I'm happy to consider offers!

When is book not a book? When it is art! James Collins said some interesting things about the aesthetics of conceptualism - also worth following up.

Update: Have just checked out what these things are worth, or more correctly what people are trying to get for them - so I'll add the idea of a swap into the deal and what interests me most at the moment are 24mm, 28mm or 35mm lenses for my Leica M8.

Bondage for beauty

Poor Iris has had to put up with a lot from me this week, first she was bound and gagged, then left hanging off a crane for few days and unmentionable violations were performed on her all in the name of art, beauty?

It's been a funny week, funniest thing of all, I had another of those emails from someone in China who was offering to make* my sculptures for me, maybe I'm missing something but I just can't understand why anyone would want to send their art out to be made by someone else. Its far cheaper if you do it yourself, you remain free to change and modify the work right up until the end and you never have to limit your vision to something that can be made by someone following your plans.

*make or worse fabricate, obviously from the Latin: fabricare, what's wrong with carve, sculpt or even create!

New sculpture

The other day the Fasham's crew and I installed my McClelland Sculpture Survey and Award piece, Sara Delaney - a head of her time - pictured above, she's looking a bit raw right at this moment, what with the freshly turned dirt, but I guess she'll settle in nicely before the show kicks off in November.

Placing sculpture in a bush setting always requires some very serious thinking because there aren't many good reasons to do it and the overwhelming permanent object precedents tend to be things like abandoned car bodies and junk, almost everything we find there implies neglect or loss. I'm intrigued by this problem, the McClelland style of bush is actually one of my favourite types of landscape, a fantastic mess which then reveals its points of interest as details. The more you look the more you see. For this sculpture I decided to avoid any chance that it could look as if there had been some civilisation in years gone by and make it look as if it was just a temporary visitor that could almost relocate itself at will.

About a week after McClelland I installed this little sculpture on the 43rd floor of the ANZ building Collins Place, Melbourne. It was a very interesting commission from the ANZ bank, the title of the project was "Unique Mastery" and the idea was for me to "respond" to their ANZ Private brand. It also gave me an opportunity to use our last Cowwarr Art Space international resident, Iris Bendor, as the model. Title: i-muse, I think, I muse or as Iris starts with "i" and is pronounced as in "is", it could be iris-muse!

A new sculpture starts to take shape, Iris again - keep you posted, she's giving me quite a hard time at moment but I think we've turned the corner. I wouldn't have really known it myself, that's a common thing for me, but Don Burrows dropped in to the studio the other day and from his reactions I realised that much of what I've been trying to sneak into this sculpture was already there. Old sculptors and old Jazz musicians have a lot to talk about.