Australia — 1st Day

We're here. Tired but here. (Bill, Yoshi, Cedra and me, that is. Joseph will be getting here on the 2nd.) An impromptu first day at the Australian Museum led us to a friend of Yoshi's, Dion Peita, the Collections Coordinator, who just happened to be free to give us a very privileged tour of their Oceanian artifact collections — a massive collection of powerful objects that are rarely exhibited. We were all stunned. Dion was a terrific guide, and it's clear he's a real asset to the museum. A few highlights are below, but the rest are well worth a look.

A Few More Images

Here's a few more images of recent drawings before I devote myself almost exclusively to Australia-related posts for the next month (I leave tomorrow!)

History of the World

Mt. Mound

Orb

Missing

Mist

Matt Coolidge and CLUI

Dedicated to the increase and diffusion of information about how the nation’s lands are apportioned, utilized, and perceived.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) is one of the strangest and most relevant operations about land in the United States.

The CLUI Land Use Database is an on-line computer database of unusual and exemplary sites throughout the United States. It is a free public resource, designed to educate and inform the public about the function and form of the National landscape, a terrestrial system that has been altered to accommodate the complex demands of our society.

Below is a brief portrait of CLUI and its founder, Matt Coolidge, courtesy of KNME New Mexico.

See more Artisodes.

Catherine Harris and Land Arts of the American West UNM

The video below is an example of the kind of work done in Land Arts of the American West at the University of New Mexico. It is a collaboration led by Catherine Harris, professor of Art and Ecology in the Department of Art and Art History at UNM. Harris demonstrated measuring space through comparative body/landscape studies such as stride patterning, using the lower leg as a transit level, and line of sight spatial marking. Harris worked with Land Arts students to develop the project, Transect Collaborative, which involved walking a transect line across Lobo Canyon, documenting it via drawings, photographs, and video, then developing a gallery installation.



View more Land Arts videos on Vimeo.

Dean Sewell and Field Studies

Social documentary photographer Dean Sewell spent time travelling with artists in the Field Studies program in 2009. His photo of the drought affected Murray River Basin (below) won him the prestigious Moran Contemporary Photographic Prize. His photos documenting the devastation in Indonesia from the 2004 tsunami are extremely affecting and well worth a look.

Dry Riverbed in the Murray River Basin, South Australia

Calperum Station, Riverland Biosphere Reserve

One of the locations we'll be exploring in Australia is Calperum Station in the Riverland Biosphere Reserve. What is a Biosphere Reserve? I didn't know. The Parks and Reserves page on the Australian Government's website, says: 'Biosphere Reserve' is an international designation made by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) on the basis of nominations submitted by countries participating in the Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB).

One interesting distinction of a Biosphere Reserve is that "people are an integral component." In other words, it exists to a large extent to promote and develop sustainable living practices.

The Riverland Biosphere is largely made up of mallee woodlands, mostly eucalypts. "Mallee" is a term describing the habit of growth where several stems grow from a mallee root just below ground level. "The Mallee scrubland of Australia is one of the most endangered vegetation types in the world, with approximately 80 per cent cleared for agriculture in the past 150 years. The mallee, like many parts of Australia, has not responded well to imposed European style land use. In the past the fragile soils and vegetation have been overexposed to grazing and inappropriate land use." (Australian Government website, Parks and Reserves)

Mallee Eucalypt

John Fahey

I've been listening to a lot of folk music, acoustic guitar and and their derivations. Came across this video of one of the best musicians I've heard.

The Desert

From Paul Shepard's Man in the Landscape:

Silence and emptiness convey divine immanence by their lack of prosaic forms. The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically and physiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historically inimical. It is always described as boundless and empty, but the human experience there is never merely existential. Its solitude is a not-empty void, a not-quiet silence. Its forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light and space, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of sky above the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overhead portion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside and forest lands.

The Western Edge of Albuquerque, NM

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is Werner Herzog's new film about Chauvet Cave, which contains the oldest known paintings, dated at around 32,000 years old—twice as old as those at Lascaux. This film was shot in 3-D, making this my first 3-D film experience (not counting the old ones with the blue and red film glasses). And having seen it this way, it's hard for me to imagine not seeing it in 3-D. In a normal 2-D projection, things just become big. With this 3-D technology, things appear close. This is significant. As a result, close-up shots of the cave interior have a much stronger sense of touch, which seems integral to this project. Since very, very few people will ever experience these paintings in person, this may be the only way we'll ever see them, and this makes the 3-D component very important in my mind.

Having said this, there are times when the 3-D effect falls short, and things feel like they're spatially confused, even inverted—some moments when the researchers were being interviewed in the cave come to mind. I don't know if this was a glitch in the filming or in the editing. However, for most of the film, and thankfully in all the moments where it seemed to really matter, like slow-panning close-ups of the cave interior, it was utterly successful and captivating.

Herzog's exploration of these paintings lead him to the eccentric characters associated with the cave, a look at other artwork from the same era (Venus of Willendorf and similar statuettes found elsewhere in Europe) and even thoughts on shadow play. There was a moment in the film which completely shifted gears from the ancient paintings to a clip of Fred Astaire dancing with his shadows. But this is an interesting metaphor as the film crew aim their own dancing lights in the cave—as Astaire's shadows dance independently of the dancer himself, the mysteries of the cave paintings cannot be known by our attempts to illuminate. They take on a life of their own.

The paintings are extraordinary. The undulating cave walls, as a working surface, are already charged with energy and movement. Added to this are layers of animal scratches, human scratches, rhythms of line and blending of charcoal (the primary pigment) with what appears to be chalk. The images themselves radiate movement through the use of repetition and rhythm, which I found fascinating (see the rhino horns below).

This is an imperfect film to be sure, but the impressions from this experience will not leave me anytime soon.

Some Drawings and Thoughts

Here's a few drawings I've done this year (below).

A few things seem to be converging with my work, my thinking and my upcoming Australia trip. I've frequently thought that my work is as much about my internal world as the external, natural world. I'm interested in this relationship, not just between the external and internal, but the specifically external natural world and how my relationship to it affects my psychology. Until recently, I never gave much thought to whom else might have investigated this issue. But I finally did wonder about this and happened upon Paul Shepard, who is considered one of the founders of a field called ecopsychology, which is still very mysterious to me. His most influential book is Nature and Madness. The fundamental theme behind his writing is our alienation from nature and its psychological impact. I'm sure I'll be revisiting this in greater detail in the future.