PASSAGES

Delaney Davidson

2012-01-11T17:08:00.000-08:00

(Last seen live at Cassels & Sons Brewery, New Year's Eve ... excellent... )

Combinatorium II: Ether

2012-01-03T10:07:00.000-08:00

Ether: "the rarefied element formerly believed to fill the upper regions of space b : the upper regions of space : heavens .... a light volatile flammable liquid C4H10O used chiefly as a solvent and especially formerly as an anesthetic" (Merriam Webster)

The cotton pad over the face. Ether. Counting down to going under. An anaesthetic from another era, the smell triggers nostalgia like some perverse version of Proustian involuntary memory ... And with the anaesthesia, lost time. Only an unaccounted for period of existence, and a residue of pain.

Cotton pads over the jars. Chloroform. Inside the jars were cicadas, captured for the purposes of zoological examination. The best place for capturing cicadas was in the Valley of the Moon. The road up was steep, gravel, following the bluffs that face out to the sea, and then beyond was a more lush realm, with a stream running through it. Abuzz with cicadas. Trapped in the jars they would flutter for awhile before entering their own insectivorous reverie. Kept in their slumber for their journey south to the university, where their fantastically veined wings and crisp carapaces would be carefully explored. Drawn perhaps, as in the epitome of delineation, AWB Powell’s Native Animals of New Zealand, published by the Auckland Institute and Museum. First published in 1947, and seemingly unchanged for the decades to follow, it offered a litany of creatures, each carefully detailed in a simple, precise line drawing, and accompanied by a paragraph of description. Scale is irrelevant to AWB Powell. A whale and a starfish, a kiwi and a flatworm, are all given the same amount of space, the same degree of detail. Not badgers, moles and beavers, as in the other books of childhood. Here are weka and weta, penguins and paua.

Large Cicada

Combinatorium I: Meths

2012-01-02T15:20:00.000-08:00

“Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.”
Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, 1993

The spirit lamps were always burning in the Dental Clinic. Inside the small wooden building there were two dental chairs, each flanked by swivelling tables and lights, extending out from the chair prosthetically. Through the windows, no foreground, no activity - only the ocean, the horizon, sky.

The spirit lamps were entrancing, mystical. Like a priest’s censer, they united a sense of holy inscrutability with an evocative odour. The lamps’ glass reservoirs held a sublimely ethereal liquid: methylated spirits dyed a divine pale purple. Gentian Violet. The swivelling table was always set out perfectly with the spirit lamp, the heavy milk-white glass, the small crucible for mixing amalgam. A mouth full of mercury. Quicksilver.

Passing the dental instruments through the flame and into the mouth drew some of the smell with it. The strange smell of burning meths. The ritualised procedures. The flame, the water. The dental nurse in her nun-like uniform. A glass is offered. Lifted to the lips. Rinse. Spit. The smell of the meths, the mysterious instruments, the lighting, the head scarf. A fusion of something sacred and unknowable, a mysterious order.

Memories ....

2011-12-09T13:19:00.001-08:00

When A City Falls

2011-11-15T22:38:00.000-08:00

The film of Christchurch's earthquakes...

Side Effects: The Memory of Place: a Preview

2011-11-12T12:13:00.000-08:00

Side Effects: The Memory of Place: a Preview: In order to entice any potential readers into buying my forthcoming book, "The Memory of Place" (official release date: 15/01/12), Amazon.c...

Robinson in Ruins

2011-11-12T11:18:00.001-08:00

Patrick Keiller talks about the film here

Lana

2011-10-07T19:40:00.001-07:00

To the Islands

2011-10-07T19:38:00.000-07:00

To the islands:
The Architecture of Isolation

Artists
Urs Bette
Jacqueline Bowring
Margit Bruenner
Michael Chapman
Jennifer Harvey
Russell Lowe
Michael Ostwald
Sean Pickersgill

Curators
Jennifer Harvey and Sean Pickersgill

Writers
Karen Burns, Jennifer Harvey & Sean Pickersgill

Exhibition launch
6pm Wednesday 28 September

Exhibition open
Tuesday 27 September - Friday 21 October

This exhibition will explore the latent architectural qualities in the idea of the 'island'. The participating artists and architects were asked to examine the text of Lucian of Samosata's 'True Stories' and the surreal islands described in the voyage. The artists have brought the thematics of these texts into contemporary experience, exploring the idea that islands may represent both symptoms and solutions to the experience of isolation.

SASA Gallery

Life in EQ City

2011-06-28T14:12:00.000-07:00

2011-06-18T16:02:00.000-07:00

Wanda ...

2011-05-18T00:54:00.000-07:00

2011-05-16T22:57:00.000-07:00

(Because sometimes you need The Jam....)

Of Time and the City

2011-05-14T17:15:00.000-07:00

Terence Davies (2008) Of Time and the City
.... thinking of memories, hauntings, things gone astray ....

[Meta]Physics

2011-03-29T01:09:00.001-07:00

What is the threshold between the laws of physics and those of metaphysics? At what point is the crossing into the world of the seemingly impossible, incomprehensible, ineffable? Where is the boundary between life and art? The image, above, is not (intentionally) an environmental art work ... but the rubble of my home, sitting on the driveway fractured by the force of the quake. Following the earthquake the house, the core of 'dwelling' is metamorphosed. The physical boundedness evaporated, and the building subsequently distilled, decanted, into a mere pile of materials. The material becomes immaterial, in both senses of the word. Things become simultaneously without tangible form, and also inconsequential. The prior priorities of what dwelling implied are re-formulated. Aspirations to an ambience of beautifully proportioned spaces, volumes of light, a garden of different pleasures, gives way instead to the most rudimentary of concerns. The garden transformed into a toilet, the house made into a kind of shed for living. Nothing else really matters. Thoughts turn inwards into the contemplative realm, of a wish to transcend the banality of existence, to somehow rise above this.

The earthquake not only shattered life, but also profoundly spoke of a temporal existence beyond the ephemerality of our own lives. Of something ancient. The violent shaking, this geological Tourette's syndrome of abrupt episodes of random utterances, brings about thoughts of mythological dimensions. The earthquake inevitably morphs into a sinister presence.

It all just seems too impossible, too abstract, too surreal. Might it be that this is all an elaborate performance art exhibit. At some time soon the sky cloth will be pulled back to reveal our 'real' city still intact behind, the lives, the buildings, all returned?

Phantom Limb

2011-03-22T22:51:00.000-07:00

It has gone. It is no longer there, but I still sense it. We are not allowed to go there, into the inner city. Still cordoned by an iron ring of ironically camouflaged army personnel, the city is off limits. Too dangerous, still, one month later. Too tragic. Those who have been admitted inside the cordon, the rescuers, those with a vital task, say we will not believe how awful it is. It has gone, nearly everything has gone. The beloved big moments and small moments that make the city, that were a vital part of what we were, amputated. The smell, they say, is unbearable. Fish markets, butcheries, cafes, now for a month with no electricity. The flowers sit outside florists, or tumbled onto the footpaths. Cafe tables and chairs where they were left...

But unable to ground truth it, to confirm it with my own eyes, it remains phantasmic. Although I did manage to stare down towards the Cathedral, and yes there was no spire. As though someone had photoshopped it out, erased it, it seems so impossible. Is the entire event a piece of theatre? Will we sometime soon sail into the sky cloth like Truman Burbank? Suddenly it will be revealed that this was staged, like the moon landing? It is so traumatic, so spectral, so invasive, so evasive? At our homes there is no respite. Things here are profoundly abnormal. It is, as they say, business as unusual. The new normal. The defamiliarised, the strangely unbeautiful... where are the edges of such a thing?

Inside the Red Zone

2011-03-18T12:24:00.000-07:00

14 minute video played at the opening of the outdoor Memorial Service for those lost in the 22 February earthquake, in Hagley Park, Christchurch, yesterday. There were plans for a walk-through of the area within the Red Zone - the core of the CBD which is still out of bounds - but it is still too dangerous. So ... turn up the sound ... Inside the Red Zone...

Christchurch Earthquake

2011-02-27T10:42:00.000-08:00

For those wanting to help after the devastating earthquake here in Christchurch on 22nd February 2011, donations are very much needed, and the government has set up an international appeal: Christchurch Earthquake Appeal

Many thanks.

My City of Ruins

2011-02-26T13:01:00.000-08:00

Wings of Desire

2011-02-08T12:51:00.000-08:00

"Once we give up the belief that our life-world is rooted in the ground, we may thus come to a point where ungroundedness is no longer experienced as existential anxiety and despair but as a freedom and lightness that finally allows us to move."
John Rajchman (1998) Constructions

Moulinette

2011-02-04T15:38:00.001-08:00

Anna Calvi, Moulinette ... (album just released ...)

Before After

2011-02-03T18:08:00.000-08:00

What next for Christchurch ... how does a city bounce back after a 7.1 magnitude earthquake (and its attendant multitude of aftershocks... now numbering 4,170)?

Before After

Sow the Salt

2011-02-03T18:04:00.000-08:00

Thomas Feiner, Steve Jansen ... plumbing the depths of the sublime

Heimlich / Garten

2011-01-31T16:20:00.001-08:00

Exploring uncanny landscape ... the Freudian looping of the Heimlich and the Unheimlich ... roaming the garden ... time for new adventures. First, a mental field trip (owing to the limitation of funds), to the Pitzhanger Manor-House in Ealing, West London. Designed by John Soane in 1800, and reverberating with a suitable presence, the manor is home to the PM Gallery, currently hosting The Witching Hour: Darkness and the Architectural Uncanny.

Here are images that cast us in to the twilight zone of marginal spaces, liminal times. Places of palpable poignancy, latent terror, suffused with sinister seething .... double takes, absences, surreality. Channelling Magritte, limning Hopper-esque moments, communing with Bill Henson ...

David Rowan Pacha Kuti (PK808)

Ravi Deepres, Lisbon, 2006

Toby de Silva, Jack (Annie Chapman), 2006

Silence and Wonder

2010-08-01T13:15:00.000-07:00

Phenomenology begins in silence.

Herbert Spiegelberg (1982). The Phenomenological Moment

The best formulation of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink, Husserl's assistant, when he spoke of 'wonder' in the face of the world. Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world's basis; it steps back to watch the forms of trancendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1962). Phenomenology of Perception

Sans Image

2010-07-13T18:48:00.000-07:00

... The sweeping devaluation and incapacitation of a human ability to generate one's own images (or imagination) is inseperable from the ascendancy of already manufactured external images, which increasingly become the impersonal raw material of psychic life and determine the formal conditions of all so-called mental images. The hegemony of the global image industries entails the cancellation of the visionary image....

Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, Meaghan Morris, Raymond Williams (2005) New keywords: a revised vocabulary of culture and society

The Ineffable

2010-07-03T16:56:00.000-07:00

Jannis Kounellis, Senza Titolo, 1969

The Weeping Meadow

2010-06-17T22:44:00.000-07:00

London After the Rain

2010-06-15T14:56:00.001-07:00

New Eyes

2010-06-03T20:29:00.001-07:00

"The real voyage of discovery lies not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes."

Marcel Proust

Topographic Phrenology

2010-05-13T12:46:00.000-07:00

Taranaki, 10 May 2010, JB

Space and Time

2010-05-03T01:34:00.000-07:00

The sense of space, and in the end, the sense of time, were both powerfully affected. Buildings, landscapes, &c. were exhibited in proportions so vast as the bodily eye is not fitted to conceive. Space swelled, and was amplified to an extent of unutterable infinity. This, however, did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time; I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 or 100 years in one night; nay, sometimes had feelings representative of a millennium passed in that time, or, however, of a duration far beyond the limits of any human experience ...

Pinhole photograph, JB

The minutest incidents of childhood, or forgotten scenes of later years, were often revived. Of this, at least, I feel assured, that there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the mind. A thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions of the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but alike, whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains for ever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day, whereas, in fact, we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are but waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.

Pinhole photographs - superimposed, JB

In the early stage of my malady the splendours of my dreams were indeed chiefly architectural; and I beheld such pomp of cities and palaces as was never yet beheld by the waking eye, unless in the clouds. To architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silvery expanses of water. The waters then changed their character--from translucent lakes shining like mirrors they now became seas and oceans.

Marlborough Sounds, JB

Text: Thomas de Quincey (1821) Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Spark of Being

2010-04-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

Mourning News

2010-03-30T00:50:00.000-07:00

Adam Farlie, Mourning Light

Everyday objects possess the most potent affective power. In their ability to withdraw their familiarity, to defamilarise themselves, ordinary objects constantly hold us to ransom. Through toying with our vested affections, they embody tremendous emotional capital. Adam Farlie's Mourning Light is lightshade as turncoat.

No longer the shedder of light, the familiar assistant with tasks, it instead casts blackness. Only the shade itself is illuminated, outwards. The interior of the lightshade is deathly black - not a flat disc, but a depth of darkness. One can place one's hand - or even one's head - into the void, and become increasingly in the dark. Our yearning for the return of the light's familiar helpfulness is met with nothing but an eternal void, a contrariness, a denial. We are left bereft.

Adam Farlie, Mourning Light

The X-ray

2010-03-19T13:08:00.000-07:00

Thoughts of an Architect - John Hejduk, 1986

1. That architectural tracings are apparitions, outlines, figments.

They are not diagrams but ghosts.

2. Tracings are similar to X-rays, they penetrate internally.

3. Erasures imply former existences.

4. Drawings and tracings are like the hands of the blind

touching the surfaces of the face in

order to understand

a sense of volume, depth and penetration.

5. The lead of an architect's pencil disappears (drawn away)

metamorphoses.

To take a site: present tracings, outlines, figments, apparitions,

X-rays of thoughts. Meditations on the sense of erasures.

To fabricate a construction of time.

To draw out by compacting in. To flood (liquid densification)

the place-site with missing letters and disappeared signatures.

To gelatinize forgetfulness.

[from Victims. A Work by John Hejduk. Architectural Association. London 1986.]

Guido Reni (17th century), St Sebastian, X-ray carried out as part of conservation by the Auckland City Art Gallery, NZ

Painters see gardens as an issue of values, of colour, light and perspective. This is their right. But there is another way to make gardens which, for the sake of clarity I would call the gardener’s way. This is difficult to explain in words, because it is something very closely linked to the earth, to water, to the sap of plants, to the air, to sunlight, to blowflies and worms … something non-verbal and unreasonable. … It cannot be defined by arguments, or by a ruler and compass. Seen in ground-plan and section form, one of these gardens is very little. I should like to avoid the obligation of drawing it or tracing it out, even with a reed, scratching the earth among manure and flies. Drawn on paper, the garden is an X-ray: the lips, the smile, the clear gaze, the skin, its tepidity, all of this is missing.

Rubió i Tudurí quoted in Eduard Bru (1997). Three on the Site / Tres en el Lugar. Barcelona: Actar, 26-27. (Rubió i Tudurí’s words are from the 1931 report on the Duchess of Gramont’s garden in Vignoleno, Italy, planned in 1931, and originally published in Arquitectura i Urbanisme, Barcelona).

Guido Reni (17th century), St Sebastian, Oil on canvas

Dark Times

2010-03-06T14:32:00.000-08:00

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
Bertolt Brecht, Motto

Tomasz Bednarczyk, I see you

Memory Mirrors

2010-02-25T03:18:00.000-08:00

Andy Lock, 2003-04, Orchard Park series (Bed)

Like a death mask, Andy Lock's images of Orchard Park persist as impressions of something now gone. Before the building was demolished Lock photographed the abandoned apartments, the images gaining a metaphysical haunting with his alchemical photo processing. Taking the images as slides, Lock projected them onto a wall painted with glow-in-the-dark paint, and then photographed the after-glow, the after-image that appeared on the wall.

Andy Lock, 2003-04, Orchard Park series (Monopoly)

Like an apparition summoned to a séance the photographs appear unearthly. The green of the glow in the dark paint is at once nostalgic and toxic. The phosphorescence is is reminiscent of a Christmas decoration I have which is generations old, and glows in the dark. This magical quality always seemed very sinister, as, so family mythology had it, the glowing surface was radioactive.

Andy Lock, 2003-04, Orchard Park series (Vinyl Armchairs)

If photography is, as Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the 1850s, "the mirror with a memory", then perhaps it is a mere skip from the specular to the spectral, of haunted reflections, the after-images of the after-life ....

Island Dreaming

2010-02-13T11:41:00.000-08:00

Video by Melinda Hunt

In the Western tradition, islands have always been associated with becoming rather than being, thresholds to other worlds, way stations rather than home places.
John Gillis

The Museum of Innocence

2010-02-09T11:06:00.000-08:00

The future Museum of Innocence, Çukurcuma, Istanbul

"The museum is not an illustration of the novel and the novel is not an explanation of the museum. They are two representations of one single story perhaps." To build a real museum of a fictional event is to enter the möbius strip of reality, surreality, superfiction. Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence, 2009, is both a novel and an actual project, a museum to be established in Çukurcuma, an area in Istanbul. Exhibited in the museum will be items related to the novel, and within the pages of the book is a map and a ticket to the museum.

Like another museal superfiction, The Museum of Contemporary Ideas, the imbricated loops and links, shuttling between a real city and an imagined story, set up a parallel existence, one which is never wholly realisable. Peter Hill's Museum of Contemporary Ideas, 1989, was the birthplace of 'superfiction,' the use of visual and textual language of official institutions to frame invented, fictional institutions, events, or people. Hill’s Art Fair Murders was both a novel and an installation that interwove fact and fiction.

Or even the recent tale of real-life French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy who unwittingly cited a fictitious philosopher in his latest book, De la Guerre en Philosophie. In the book Lévy quotes Jean-Baptiste Botul, a faux philosopher invented by Frederic Pages. Although perceived as a major error on Lévy's part - even a quick search on the internet will reveal the nature of Botul's existence, and his particular strand of philosophy known as Botulism - perhaps, just maybe, it is an intricate work of superfiction... Like Pamuk's creation of a real museum for a fictional story, of Hill's elaborate interweaving of life and art, citing an imaginary theorist might elevate mere philosophy to a work of art...

(Image above from Açalya Allmer (2009) Orhan Pamuk's 'Museum of Innocence': on architecture, narrative and the art of collecting . Arq : Architectural Research Quarterly, 13(2))

Diagrams ... out now

2010-02-04T20:48:00.000-08:00

Since the 1980s, the diagram has become a preferred method for researching, communicating, theorising and making architectural designs, ideas and projects. Thus the rise of the diagram, as opposed to the model or the drawing, is the one of the most significant new developments in the process of design in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Diagrams of Architecture is the first anthology to represent – through texts and diagrams – the histories, theories and futures of architecture through the diagram.

Spanning the Pre–historic to the Parametric, Diagrams of Architecture illustrates over 250 diagrams and brings together 26 previously published and newly commissioned essays from leading international academics, architects, theorists and professional experts. These combine to define the past and future of the diagram′s discourse. Prefaced with a critical introduction by Mark Garcia, each text investigates a central concept or dimension of the diagram ranging from socio–cultural studies, science, philosophy, technology, CAD/CAM, computing and cyberspace and virtual/digital design to methodology, environment/sustainability and phenomenological, poetic and art architecture; as well as interior, urban, engineering, interactive and landscape design.

The first critical, multidisciplinary book on the history, theory and futures of the architectural diagram. Includes seminal articles on the diagram from the history and theory of architecture such as those by Peter Eisenman, Sanford Kwinter, MVRDV, Neil Spiller, Lars Spuybroek, UN Studio and Anthony Vidler. Features 16 newly commissioned articles by leading architects and theorists, including Will Alsop, Charles Jencks, Hanif Kara, Patrik Schumacher, Bernard Tschumi, Leon van Schaik and Alejandro Zaera–Polo.Includes a full–colour critical collection of over 250 of the most significant and original diagrams, many of which are previously unpublished, in the history of architecture from around the world.

[Includes: Jacky Bowring and Simon Swaffield, Diagrams of Landscape Architecture]

John Wiley & Sons 2010 ISBN-10: 0470519444

Beyond the Scene

2010-02-04T17:59:00.000-08:00

beyond the scene
Landscape and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand
Co-editors Janet Stephenson, Mick Abbott, Jacinta Ruru

Well-known writers, from a range of disciplines, explore the many meanings of landscape...

If a nation could be said to have a dominant passion, New Zealand’s would be its landscapes. Images of spectacular natural features pervade the media – between the pages of glossy coffee-table books, in tourism promotions and on screen as the setting for blockbuster movies - but are these scenes that define its people?

For Beyond the Scene the editors asked eleven writers to choose a landscape that was important to them and to write about it from the perspective of their life experience and knowledge. From farmer to art historian and film critic, geographer and planner to lawyer, from landscape architect to poet and environmentalist – these are diverse voices. Each discusses a very different landscape: from suburban Auckland and rural Waikato to a planned town in Canterbury and much-filmed Otago. Together they investigate the relationship landscape has to identity, community and psyche.

Contents
Foreword Diane Menzies
1 Entering Landscape Janet Stephenson, Jacinta Ruru and Mick Abbott
2 Land, Sea and Sky in Taranaki Maori Songs of Lament Ailsa Smith
3 Of Rocks and Recollections: Our home in the South Waikato Gordon Stephenson
4 Waitaha – A Canterbury poem sequence David Eggleton
5 Eternal Sunshine: The search for spotless landscapes Jacky Bowring
6 Otara and Dannemora: Contrasting landscape and ethnic identities in two South Auckland suburbs Wardlow Friesen and Robin Kearns
7 Films, National Identity and the Otago Landscape Davinia Thornley
8 Outside the Frame: Depicting Auckland's urban landscape Linda Tyler
9 A Cloaked Landscape: Legal devices in Mount Aspiring National Park Jacinta Ruru
10 Patina: People and place in Akaroa Janet Stephenson
11 Travelleing Landscapes: Ngai Tahu rock and and Ngai Tahu identity Lyn Carter
12 A Future with Our Past: Toward a creative practice of heritage in the Coastal Otago
landscape Mick Abbott
13 Landscape’s Generosity Janet Stephenson, Jacinta Ruru and Mick Abbott

beyond the scene
Landscape and Identity in Aotearoa New Zealand
Co-editors Janet Stephenson, Mick Abbott, Jacinta Ruru
Environmental studies, Planning, Geography, Cultural Studies
240 x 170mm, 224 pp, ISBN 978 1 877372 81 0, $45.00
Otago University Press

email: booksales@otago.ac.nz.
www.otago.ac.nz/press

Killing Time

2010-02-03T23:06:00.001-08:00

Lincoln, 2008, JB

Memories are killing. So you must not think of certain things, of those that are dear to you, or rather you must think of them, for if you don’t there is the danger of finding them, in your mind, little by little.

Samuel Beckett

London, 2006, JB

... we hold within us a treasure of impressions, clustered in small knots, each with a flavour of its own, formed from our own experiences, that become certain moments of our past...

Marcel Proust

One of those periods of harvesting - not sowing, but reaping, as the sun is high in the sky and the mind's eye turns inward. The mind has many chambers, akin to a cow's stomach. Thoughts, images, memories, move between these vast spaces, and after each passage are slowly transformed. Mnemonic enzymes are added. Sharp edges are slowly broken down. Precision becomes frisson, a mere glancing encounter, a sensation, the slight breath of wind. Was it so?

The Pathology of Melancholy

2010-01-28T17:57:00.000-08:00

Thomas Feiner and Anywhen, Dinah and the Beautiful Blue

Depression and death are black holes for melancholy. Their gravitational force is such that they claim melancholy almost wholly, leaving only small particles available for the remainder of the pathology of the self. For the un-nameable malaise of a Friday afternoon in summer, contemplating the passage of another of one's years, another circling, an ascent, a descent, the perfect annual spiral. And there are particles available for the particular state of mind brought on by the return from voyages, where the space of domestic life seems so poignant, a distant friend. And, too, for that which is most elegant in Latin, Post coitum omne animal triste ... if not la petite mort, then la petite post mortum.

The Little Death and the Beautiful Blue claim particles of melancholy, along with the sound one hears across the valley, a cliché perhaps that it is a church bell, and even one shrouded in the mist of a summer's morn, yet it causes a pathological affect in the small channel that connects the inner ear into the brain's most contemplative chambers, flooding them momentarily in the fugitive fluids which are the carriers for the fleeting pain of poignancy. The Physician's Guide to the Pathology of Melancholy is a slim, yet dense volume, largely considered an addendum to the weighty tomes on Death and Depression. It is seen by some as a hymnal, a litany of lyrical effects. And by others a wish list, an itinerary, a gazetteer, a route through a certain map of the human heart and mind.

Limning

2010-01-10T23:35:00.000-08:00

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Waves. Study from the Cliff Above, Freshwater Gate, July 23,1863

The apparition of a line upon a page. Careful tracing. The discipline of drawing. These past few weeks of silence afford time to draw, the nudging of form, limning of space, dropping into details. Through the measured, studied investigations the mind grows its own convolutes, the spatial sense expands, the awareness of phenomena is heightened.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, Clouds, July 29 or 30 and July 31, 1863.

The prospect of a page and a pencil is laden with anticipation. Revelations. Imaginings. Inventions. Against the slick rendering of computer generated imagery is the humility of drawing, the humanism of representation. Almost as though unmediated, like automatic writing, the eye feeds the hand.

Peter Greenaway, still from The Draughtsman's Contract

(Mr Neville making the drawing - the actual drawing by Greenaway himself)

Contemplation of the Sublime

2010-01-08T12:12:00.000-08:00

Confrontation, contemplation, the yielding of one's self to what is beheld. An alarming, piercing reality. A sense of suspension. The vertiginous falling into the world. The trance-like experience of immersion, submersion. Solitude, tranquility, isolation. Many of the actors in Werner Herzog's Heart of Glass performed under hypnosis, amplifying the oneiric atmosphere. The hallucinatory lucidity that lies slightly askance of the quotidian. How many degrees must one move to enter this realm, the everyday surreal sublime? What must shift for things to enter the pleasing unease? To allow one's self to suddenly fall, tumbling through the pane into the otherworldly realm that lies nearby, or within.

"Strange! So infinitesimally narrow is the threshold between the two realms, and yet no one raises their foot to cross it! The other reality borders on our skin, yet we do not feel it! Our imagination stops here, where it could create new land."

Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican, 1921

A New Year State of Mind

2010-01-06T13:09:00.000-08:00

Straying through a world of pages, words, lost, loving being lost. Journeys of the mind this year. Faraway ... so close. A journey through the most utilitarian of places becomes a mystical ascension. The car park building is arranged around a perfect spiral, on the pretext of searching for a park one loops, ascends, up the line of grace, a helix built around the wonder of centrifugal force, the phenomenological ecstasy of driving, up, up, 8 floors, 9 floors, 10 floors, on ... 15 floors, then ... sky ... vast celestial dome of blue, and an expanse of open desert-like space. Vacant and tranquil. Transported within the city, to another world within. Scratch the surface and the city is surreal.

Immaculate Conception

2009-12-17T22:31:00.000-08:00

Tacita Dean, Tate Christmas Tree 2009

In sound, in text, in image - and in concept - there is a moment when the tuning seems to have found that perfect note. Without static, free from unnecessary embellishment, focussed and pure, there is the sense of an immaculate moment. Tacita Dean's Tate Christmas tree seems such a moment. Like Dean's work in film and photography, the tree embodies aspects of memory, of pasts present. The tree is an iconic Christmas tree - a Nordmann fir - decorated only with candles. Made from beeswax, the candles are calibrated to mark the diurnal fading of light. Lit at 4pm when the light fades in the gallery, they burn for precisely 2 hours until the gallery closes, underscoring the passage through twilight. The lighting of the candles, their eschewing of technology, and the image of the candlelight, suffuses the tree with the ritual of Christmas's past.

Tacita Dean: "I was struck when I arrived in Berlin by the simplicity of Christmas there. I felt the Germans had managed to hold onto something of its purity and magic despite commercial pressures. As many of my films encompass twilight and the transition from day to night, it seems appropriate to light the candles at this moment of each day."

Seasons Greetings ...

Wisconsin Death Trip

2009-12-14T11:05:00.000-08:00

Surface Paradise

2009-12-13T12:22:00.000-08:00

Gitta Gschwendtner, Animal Wall, Cardiff Bay, Wales

The surfaces which surround our bodies in space are imbued with a phenomenological potentiality. Surface as skin presents the possibility of intensification of moisture, dryness, gravity, lightness, being. And the surfaces in themselves breathe, inhabit, co-habit. Gitta Gschwendtner's Animal Wall provides space for bats and birds. As a faunal parallel to the adjacent housing development, 1000 nesting boxes are provided in the eerie eyrie wall. The wall of R&SIE[N]'s 'I'm lost in Paris' house infuses the surface with flora, where some 1,200 ferns are grown hydroponically, with the fruit-like glass vessels feeding them with bacteria, nutrients and rainwater. Each wall provides a dissolution of the thick black line of separation, and presents an encounter zone.

R&SIE[N], 'I'm Lost in Paris' House, Paris, France

Beauty All Over Again

2009-12-08T12:05:00.000-08:00

Richard Wright

Richard Wright, guitarist with Correcto, has won the Turner Prize ... with a return to beauty. Painting that is all over the wall, and painting that is soon all over. The ephemerality of the painting is fundamental to its beauty, the fleeting beauty of that which passes. Reminiscent of Oscar Muñoz's painting with water there is a poignancy in that which is made to not endure, the intensification of the experiential, such that it must be fully consumed by the senses as the mind is always already aware that this is a fleeting immersion ... somehow a counterpoint to Jorge Otero-Pailos' wall castings, the dialogue with the wall, the direct engagement. In Wright's case to always be painted over, in Otero-Pailos's to be a momentary embrace which yields the trace.

Love and Landscape

2009-12-01T15:41:00.000-08:00

Fifth panel of Colin McCahon (1958) Northland Panels ['a landscape with too few lovers']

Tears on leaving. Not a lover, but a landscape. The childhood landscape. The one which was loved too little then. Resenting its insularity, its rurality, its lack of all that was in Other Places, let alone Overseas. Not the landscape of hill, cloud, scarred paddock, not McCahon's Northland, but the epigraph is still apt. Instead it is mountains, sea, one road in, one road out. On this last visit the landscape sulked, the mountains hid behind the curtains of cloud. The sea glowered and slopped about, uncooperative. However much amends might have be sought, for the lack of loving, an audience was not even granted. Can one betray a landscape? Will a landscape forgive?

Trajectories

2009-11-30T11:29:00.000-08:00

Today ... New Zealand launched its first rocket into space. A slender, unmanned rocket was launched from a site on Great Mercury Island. Witnesses to the rocket launch had tears in their eyes, the experience described as 'profound' ... 'pure elation' ...

Today ... New Zealand's second largest repatriation of human remains arrived at Te Papa. In wooden caskets, the remains of 33 Maori were returned from museums in Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Sweden. The origin of many of the repatriated individuals, including tattooed preserved heads, is believed to be the Mercury Islands.

This passing of invisible trajectories, tracks through time and space, ancient and futuristic, crosses for a moment at the Mercury Islands ... this place where Captain Cook paused a while in 1769 to watch the planet Mercury cross in front of the Sun ... this moment when Cook was able to fix his latitude and longitude, a point in space, a moment in a trajectory of time ...

The Cloud of [Un]Knowing

2009-11-29T23:58:00.000-08:00

A poem of sorts: where the metaphysical realm of the virtual conjures up haiku-like clouds of text. Perhaps a Tag Cloud Spotters' Guide is called for. Is one's own cloud the light and wispy Cirrus, woven with small streaks of light, up high in the rarefied zones? Or are there the traits of the Cumulonimbus, rumbling, crackling, a downpour always already imminent? Within the William S Burroughs-like congealed fragments, the strangely amputated stanzas, there are curious moments, micro-intoxications, like the "New Zealand Pleasure Finalists"... heralding a joyous cloud formation, like the fluffy Cumulus of a holiday sky. The Search [for] Gloom ... a leaden cloud laden with dank drizzle. And the serenity of the isolated 'Solitude', a small cloud in a clear blue sky, a lenticular formation of the sort one sees parked above hills, mimicking the topography ...

Substantial Reading

2009-11-24T22:40:00.001-08:00

Landfall 218

Sssssssssh.....

2009-11-15T23:18:00.001-08:00

Cockatoo Island, Sydney, JB

"The observation of two minutes' silence by an entire nation at 11am on 11/11 is the greatest work of modern art the British have ever come up with... in this age of mass participatory cultural events, the poetry of shared silence is perhaps appreciated more than ever. Who would have thought contemporary art would school us in remembrance?" Jonathan Jones

"Noise masked as music had pursued her since early childhood. During her years at the Academy of Fine Arts, students had been required to spend whole summer vacations at a youth camp. They lived in common quarters and worked together on a steelworks construction site. Music roared out of loudspeakers on the site from five in the morning until nine at night. She felt like crying, but the music was cheerful, and there was nowhere to hide, not in the latrine or under the bedclothes: everything was in range of the speakers. The music was like a pack of hounds that had been sicked on her." Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Contemporary Confessional, Christchurch, JB

One Degree of Separation

2009-11-13T18:27:00.001-08:00

Simon Patterson, The Great Bear, 1992 (detail)

Roland Barthes' assertion of the 'death of the author' somehow evaporates when the object of one's writing is suddenly reading what one has written. While Barthes promoted the creative intervention of the reader in the experiencing of a work - or in the case of my current conundrum, the viewer - the sudden presence of the author (director) has a somehow immutable and omnipotent power. They are far from 'dead.' Is what I have written about his work of any interest to him? Is it, even, truthful? Does that matter (in the context of the reader's promotion to creative ally of the author)?

This has happened some times before, direct contact with the topic of one's musings ....with theorists who suddenly loom large at conferences, here or there, hither or yon. However, this latest imminent exchange is perhaps the most intimidating yet, and productive of an extreme and scrupulous self-critique. Crises of confidence ensue.

The webs of association are intriguingly complex and imbricated. The various degrees of separation sometimes suddenly fall away, till there is The Other, right there, without intermediary. This web is remiscent of Simon Patterson's The Great Bear. Playing on the idea of 'constellations' of thinkers, artists, musicians, philosophers, Patterson deemed his particular configuration a grouping of stars called The Great Bear, which is clustered along the various lines of the London Underground. So, now, travelling via the line of Great Directors, and imagining I would, as usual, simply rattle by the station and stare at it out the window, I find that I have now disembarked, and am confronting it, in person ...

Tracings

2009-11-08T22:56:00.000-08:00

Wesleyan Methodist Church (Verso), November 2009, JB

"She had learned that over the ages various metaphors had been used for explaining memory, all of them attempts to understand how the mind worked. There were seals leaving traces on soft wax; vast storehouses with many chambers and ranks of pigeonholes, some secret; elaborate palaces with thousands of rooms each named. There were metaphors from photography in which memory acted like a chemical, leaving ghostly images behind; and from archaeology with its shards and relics, all needing sifting and reassembly. Meanwhile, from the digital world came hard and soft discs and neural nets. There were also homunculi and mystic writing pads in which scratchy trces or scars were left on a hard plate that was continually being overwritten."

Lisa Appignanesi, The Memory Man, 2004, p,44

Temporal Inversion

2009-11-07T10:47:00.001-08:00

7.54am [pinhole camera image] JB

The oxymoronic melancholy of spring is insistent, pervasive. Amidst the effusive efflorescences, the shattering chartreuse - a lime-ish green that is alarming in its intensity - there is a darkness. That conundrum: the resistance of happiness in the presence of beauty because of the knowledge that it will pass, the ubi sunt effect. And here - way down here - out of step with the 'old world,' there is an amplification of the inevitability of the passage of all things. In spring the rituals and festivals of the old world's autumn are marked, such that at the height of the spasm of renewal, planting and growth, the celebrations, with some bizarre macabre twist, mark the ending of things - meditations upon death. All Hallows' Eve, All Saints Day and All Souls Day come not with the darkening evenings, with bonfire pyres, rotting and decay - but with bright sunshine and blossom. Senescence is always already a presence.

B[l]eached bone [pinhole camera image] JB

All Saints Day

2009-11-05T11:32:00.000-08:00

A procession. Medieval. Theatrical. Spiritual. Water is gently flicked from the ceremonial vessel with a frond of Kowhai from the Sacred Grove.

The words are intoned:
Bishop Kito: The earth brought forth vegetation; plants yielding seed, and trees of every kind ... and God saw that it was good.
Bishop Winston: As the earth brings forth its blossom, or bushes in a garden burst into flower, so shall God make righteousness and praise flourish before all people.

The consecration is peformed. Upon a sunny Sunday late afternoon, Evensong into evening, the broad vistas connecting to the volcanic cones beyond, the ley lines and resonances of topography become momentarily intensified. And it was good.

Sunday ... drifting ...

2009-10-24T17:05:00.001-07:00

Hope Sandoval, Wild Roses (new album out Through the Devil Softly Sept, 2009)

The Repository of the Self

2009-10-18T00:53:00.000-07:00

"Days in the past cover up little by little those that preceded them and are themselves buried beneath those that follow them. But each past day has remained deposited in us, as in a vast library where, even of the oldest of books, there is a copy which doubtless nobody will ever ask to see."

Books of the Dead (containing ash), California, 2001, JB

"And yet should this day from the past, traversing the translucency of the intervening epochs, rise to the surface and spread itself inside us until it covers us entirely, then for a moment names resume their former meaning, people their former aspect, we ourselves our state of mind at the time, and we feel, with a vague suffering which however is endurable and will not last for long, the problems which have long ago become insoluble and which caused us such anguish at the time."

Avonhead Park Cemetery, 2002, JB

"Our ego is composed of the super imposition of our successive states. But this superimposition is not unalterable like the stratification of a mountain. Incessant upheavals raise to the surface ancient deposits."

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time / The Remembrance of Things Past

Melancholia

2009-10-12T13:45:00.000-07:00

London, June 2007, JB

"I am melancholic; not depressive, but inclined to view the certainty of decay, loss and death as rather more significant than the prospect of the fun and excitements to be had from life before these things set in. I have experienced as violence the emergence of the culture of compulsory industrialised joy, which is the companion of consumerism."

Jeremy Seabrook

Time Space

2009-10-09T01:26:00.000-07:00

Through the Pass, October 2009, JB

"In North Greenland distances are measure in sinik, in 'sleeps', the number of nights that a journey requires. It's not a fixed distance. Depending on the weather and the time of year, the number of sinik can vary. It's not a measurement of time, either. Under the threat of a storm, I've travelled with my mother non-stop from Force Bay to Iita, a distance that should have required two nights.

Sinik is not a distance, not a number of days or hours. It is both a spatial and a temporal phenomenon, a concept of space-time, it describes the union of space and motion and time that is taken for granted by the Inuit but cannot be captured by any European everyday language."

Peter Hoeg, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, 1992

Motukiekie, October 2009, JB

"Somewhere a clock strikes four double strikes, four bells, the measure of time at sea, a time that doesn't distinguish between night and day but only the monotone changeover of four-hour watches. These bells reinforce the feeling that we're at a standstill, that we've never left port but have remained stationary in time and space, merely twisting ourselves further down into meaninglessness."

Peter Hoeg, Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow, 1992

Speculation

2009-09-26T12:51:00.000-07:00

Mark Rothko, Browns, 1957? (via Wood s Lot)

Colin McCahon, Tomorrow will be the same, but not as this is, 1958 - 59

Stanley Kubrick, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968

Present Absence

2009-09-26T02:25:00.000-07:00

Glove Object, Christchurch, September 2009, JB

I See A Darkness

2009-09-23T21:34:00.000-07:00

Guido Reni (17th century), St Sebastian, Oil on canvas, and X-ray of the painting carried out as part of conservation by the Auckland City Art Gallery, NZ

Darkness: "We have considered darkness as a cause of the sublime; and we have all along considered the sublime as depending on some modification of pain or terror: so that if darkness be no way painful or terrible to any, who have not had their minds early tainted with superstitions, it can be no source of the sublime to them. But, with all deference to such an authority, it seems to me, that an association of a more general nature, an association which takes in all mankind, and make darkness terrible; for in utter darkness it is impossible to know in what degree of safety we stand; we are ignorant of the objects that surround us; we may every moment strike against some dangerous obstruction; we may fall down a precipice the first step we take; and if an enemy approach, we know not in what quarter to defend ourselves; in such a case strength is no sure protection; wisdom can only act by guess; the boldest are staggered, and he, who would pray for nothing else towards his defence, is forced to pray for light."

Blackness: "Though the effects of black be painful originally, we must not think they always continue so. Custom reconciles us to everything. After we have been used to the sight of black objects, the terror abates, and the smoothness and glossiness, or some agreeable accident, of bodies so coloured, softens in some measure the horror and sternness of their original nature; yet the nature of their original impression still continues. Black will always have something melancholy in it, because the sensory will always find the change to it from other colours too violent; or if it occupy the whole compass of the sight, it will then be darkness; and what was said of darkness will be applicable here."

Edmund Burke, On the Sublime and Beautiful

2009-09-19T13:34:00.000-07:00

Storm Brewing, Philadelphia/Otago, 2009/2007, JB

“I feel that there is much to be said for the Celtic belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some inferior being, in an animal, in a plant, in some inanimate object, and thus effectively lost to us until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to pass by a tree or to obtain possession ofthe object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as soon aswe have recognised their voice the spell is broken. Delivered by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.”
Marcel Proust, The Remembrance of Things Past (1913)

Oneiric House

2009-09-09T20:50:00.000-07:00

Machine for Navigating the Cosmos, September 2009, JB

The house is a "metaphysical instrument, a mythical tool with which we try to introduce a reflection of eternity into our momentary existence." Juhani Pallasmaa

It's "an instrument with which to confront the cosmos." Gaston Bachelard

"To make their home in the world, that is, to build, human beings must gain more than physical control, they must establish spiritual control. To do so they must wrest order from what at first seems contingent, fleeting, and confusing, transforming chaos into cosmos." Karsten Harries

Minimalism

2009-09-05T22:01:00.000-07:00

Formal Park, September 2009, JB

The Afterlives of Others

2009-09-01T19:06:00.000-07:00

Draped Urn / Book / Draped Column, Addington, June 2009, JB

Roaming the Theatres of Memory, amidst the Afterlives of Others. Like the elements of the memory theatre which assisted the orators with memorising their speeches, the symbolic traces of the cemetery present small clues to the departed. The mnemonic forensics release only the merest trace. What is the subtext of the draped urn of mourning as opposed to the burning urn of undying friendship?

Greeting God, Lyttelton, June 2009, JB

Shaking hands. A farewell to the mortals or a greeting of god?

The hourglasses, the chains.

Olives, oaks.

City of the Dead, Linwood, June 2009, JB

Open books and broken columns.

A pillow and a rope.

Cluedo or the Game of Life?

Poetry of the Ports

2009-08-30T13:02:00.000-07:00

TRANSPORT

SEA AIR

Flights Arrivals

Jet Star
Pacific Blue

Ships in Port Today

Cerveza II
Enchanter
Endurance
Oracle
Reel Passion
San Nicholas
Tanea
Tawera
Te Ariki Nui

Scared / Sacred

2009-08-29T12:48:00.000-07:00

Temple of Athena /Gun Emplacement, August 2009, JB

"A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, the boundary is that from which something begins its presencing." Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking

Temples or gun emplacements? Awaiting the enemy or framing the view? The decades between intention and appreciation melt away the menace, and instead there's scenery by stealth. Late afternoon light on a late winter's day brings a metamorphosis. The nervous cliffs at the harbour edge become places of grace, they become Vincent Scully's - his earth, his temples, his gods. An antipodean Aegean Sea, Poseidon, Apollo, Athena in attendance.

Temple of Poseidon / Coastal Monitoring Facility, August 2009

Freefall...

2009-08-27T22:21:00.000-07:00

Filmed for the live performance by XELA at Monkeytown, Brooklyn, NY by Matthew Murphy.

[Best viewed Full Screen, and sound on Max...] [Plus a glass of something very darkly red ...]

Dream / Land

2009-08-22T19:07:00.001-07:00

Flying / Dreaming, August 2009 JB

For us the land is matrix and destroyer,

Resentful, darkly known

By sunset omens, low words heard in branches;

Or where the red deer lift their innocent heads

Snuffing the wind for danger,

And from our footfall's menace bound in terror.

Flying / Dreaming 2, August 2009, JB

(Dreaming of James K Baxter's words, his 'Matukituki Valley ...' (1949))

Spectral City

2009-08-21T20:10:00.000-07:00

Early morning, another city. Traces of humanity drift across anonymous facades. A blind down, a window open.

No-one on the streets. Just the aura of the haunted. Smears of ectoplasm. The scraping of poltergeists.

And a pair of shoes.

"Ghosts crawl over this landscape like termites on a rock."

Emily Perkins, Novel About My Wife, 2008

On Memory

2009-08-08T13:06:00.000-07:00

Dunedin North, May 2009, JB

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Roy Batty in Bladerunner (1982) [ad-libbed by Rutger Hauer]

The fragmentary and partial. The small elements of memory that make up a life. The shoebox of letters placed in the recycling bin - a line drawn in the sand. One day soon to return re-formed, reincarnated, as an egg carton. The photographs on the lost camera card, fading in the mind's eye, vaporising. The unrecorded impressions. The flooding of the mind, the eyes, when the wintersweet flowers. The optimism of a freesia. Soon springing into summer, a winter's worth of reverie to be catalogued, from the fug of hibernation into lucidity ...

Man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end ... one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (1966)

For when you look back on the whole past course of immeasurable time and think how manifold are the shapes which the motions of matter take, you may easily believe that these very same seeds of which we now are formed have often before been placed in the same order in which they now are; and yet we cannot recover this in memory: a break in our existence has been interposed, and all the motions have wandered to and fro far astray from the sensations they produced.
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (50 BC)

Lonesomeness

2009-07-28T22:14:00.000-07:00

Lonesome I

Lonesome George, the only surviving member of the Pinta Galapagos Tortoise species. Having outlived all the other members of his species he's marooned, stranded in some strange non-place, non-time. Solitary. Like Mary Shelley's Last Man, Lonesome George exists in a vacuum, the most profound of existential crises.

Lonesome II

South of the South Island, out in the vast seas which gesture towards Antarctica, is the small land mass of Stewart Island, or Rakiura. The island is sparsely inhabited, and a national park since 2002. Back in the late 1970s a Japanese woman was found living in a cave on the island. Her reason for being there was simply to be as far from Japan as possible. In self-imposed exile she had found the ultimate margin, the most extreme periphery, in which to exist.

Lonesome III

On the far side of the moon Apollo 13 eked out its small reserves, in the most remote of all human excursions. Out of sight, out of sound, in silence, in freezing cold. The immense solitude, and extreme desolation of that moment in space, in time, is chilling ... so lonesome ...

Mesmerise

2009-07-23T16:45:00.000-07:00

Riceboy Sleeps* - All the Big Trees

*( Jonsi Birgisson from Sigur Ros and Alex Sommers)

Resonances ...

Masahisa Fukase, The Solitude of Ravens ...

Nayoro, 1977

Kanazawa, 1978

Revelation

2009-07-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

Gnomon, July 2009, JB

gnōmōn pin of a sundial; gnmōn lit., interpreter, discerner

Book of Hours

2009-07-21T19:18:00.000-07:00

Alchemy of mid-winter. Summer concealed in fallow fields. Winter congealed in the mud and slush. Days which are mere moments, mesmerising in their fleetingness. Light is precise, and shadows incisive. The Very Rich Hours, incantations recounting the marching of time, reciting rituals, as seasons slide past. A journey south into snow. A journey north into severe gales under glowering sky, uncannily warm air quickly supplanted by terrifying winds tearing things apart. Time passes.

Images ... Otago, July 2009, JB

Time Out of Mind

2009-07-11T14:50:00.000-07:00

Dunedin, July 2009, JB

'The Snug', Oamaru, July 2009, JB

Reading the Landscape

2009-07-08T14:42:00.000-07:00

Colonial Ensign, Dunedin, July 2009, JB

Moon / Dust

2009-07-03T02:35:00.000-07:00

Mark Tansey, Robbe-Grillet Cleansing Every Object in Sight, 1981

Dusting and casting drift into thoughts of the melancholy of the eternal, and the Sisyphusian Sublime of the infinite. The daunting desolation of Mark Tansey's image of Alain Robbe-Grillet at work, cleaning a seemingly infinite expanse of coded objects, weighs heavily. Carefully dusting the tiny monuments ... a Pyramid, the souvenirs of Napoleon, the Sphinx ... on one hand Robbe-Grillet is intimately engaged with what is at hand, and on the other completely overwhelmed by vastness. The whole is an echo of Robbe-Grillet's writing, oscillating wildly between the carefully observed moment, and the infinitely complex and imbricated texts which confound. (Robbe-Grillet later wrote a response to Mark Tansey. entitled "A Graveyard of Identities and Uniforms", in which he describes a scene in which an obelisk bears witness to the passing of a designer of cenotaphs and mausoleums ... it reads, Mark Tansey: Architect).

The poignancy of Robbe-Grillet's task, the vastness, the absence of presence, is echoed in the otherworldly images of the Moon, of Mars, of the places which are inhabited only mythologically, cerebrally ...

Viking Lander, Mars, 1976

And the theme song which plays over such images, Blind Willie Johnson's Dark Was the Night, Cold was the Ground, the blind, black musician buried in a pauper's grave in Texas, immortalised, aboard the Voyager spacecraft, on the Golden Record, off into the melancholy infinity of space .... in eternal defiance of death ...

Tarkovsky Icons

2009-06-27T23:26:00.000-07:00

Mimmo Paladino, For Andreij Tarkovskij, State II 2008

"... if, on the one hand, I feel close to Giotto and Piero della Francesca, on the other I pay attention to Byzantine and Russian icons…I believe that the superficial glance is very much in keeping with the fast moving times we live in." Mimmo Paladino

Mimmo Paladino, For Andreij Tarkovskij, 2007

Toru Takemitsu:
"Nostalghia, In memory of Andrei Tarkovsky" (1987)
For solo violin and string orchestra

Black and Blue

2009-06-24T01:46:00.000-07:00

Mark Rothko, No. 1, 1964 [Black-Form Paintings]

Black is like the silence of the body after death, the close of life.

Wassily Kandinsky, 1911.

Mark Rothko, No. 6(?), 1964 [Black-Form Paintings]

When [blue] sinks almost to black, it echoes a grief that is hardly human.

Wassily Kandinsky 1911

Mark Rothko, No. 7, 1964 [Black-Form Paintings]

Dusting and Casting

2009-06-23T13:35:00.001-07:00

Jorge Otero-Pailos, The Ethics of Dust: Doge's Palace, Venice 2009 [Venice Biennale]

Latex is poured over an unrestored wall of the Doge's Palace. The resulting cast ... a palimpsest of sorts ... or a print lifted from lithographic stone ... perhaps a death mask ... is embedded with the detritus of centuries, the dust, the grime, the dents, the traces of all those flies on the wall, watching ...

The cast, the dust, is an impression, in all senses of the word, bringing to mind the passage from Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, of that which is embedded within an abandoned space ... "But the walls themselves were the most unforgettable. The stubborn life of these rooms had not allowed itself to be trampled out. It was still there; it clung to the nails that had been left in the walls; it found a resting-place on the remaining handbreadth of flooring; it squatted beneath the corner beams where a little bit of space remained. One could see it in the colours which it had slowly changed, year by year: blue into a mouldy green, green into grey, and yellow into a stale, drab, weary white. But it was also in the places that had kept fresher, behind the mirrors, the pictures, and the wardrobes; for it bad outlined their contours over and over again, and had been with cobwebs and dust even in these hidden retreats that now lay uncovered. It was in every bare, flayed streak of surface, it was in the blisters the dampness had raised at the edges of the wallpapers; it floated in the torn-off shreds, and sweated out of the long-standing spots of filth. And from these walls once blue, and green and yellow, framed by the tracks of the disturbed partitions, the breath of these lives came forth - the clammy, stuggish, fusty breath, which no wind had yet scattered."

And of landscape as the 'state of the soul' ... Paysage-état-de-l’âme

And of the castings of Rachel Whiteread, the creations of solids from voids, paperweights for the volatile memories which drift in spaces ....

Rachel Whiteread, House 1993

Death Mask of Napoleon Bonaparte

Winter Solstice

2009-06-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

Francesca Woodman

The slightest slivers of light, Emily Dickinson's 'slants'. Things become lost in the shadows, and the topography of existence is reduced. Light skimming the high points, the rest a vast ocean of mid-winter gloom.

Follower of Rembrandt

Times for solitude. Introspective inspection. A slow rumination over the gathered words, images. Thinking paced as incantation. Threading together of thoughts, Benjamin's 'rosary bead' conception of history.

Beyond the Frozen Sea

2009-06-18T13:08:00.000-07:00

Inhabiting the Sublime .... Scenes of Casa Malaparte (Adalberto Libera ) from Le Mépris - Jean-Luc Godard

Amidst Light and Darkness

2009-06-17T13:10:00.000-07:00

June Pole, June 2009, JB

Ecstasy mingles shadows and sparks in a weird dance; it weaves a dramatic vision of fugitive glimmers in mysterious obscurity, playing with all the nuances of light through total darkness. Nevertheless, this gorgeous display is not as important as the mere fact that it holds and fascinates you. The height of ecstasy is the final sensation, in which you feel you are dying because of all this light and darkness. Especially weird is the fact that ecstasy wipes out surrounding objects, familiar forms of the world, until all that is left is a monumental projection of shadow and light.

E M Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

The Shudder and the Other

2009-06-14T20:28:00.000-07:00

June 2009, JB

And if, "Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe," then, too, "aesthetic comportment is to be defined as the capacity to shudder ... life in the subject is nothing but what shudders, the reaction to the total spell that transcends the spell. Consciousness without shudder is reified consciousness. The shudder in which subjectivity stirs without yet being subjectivity is the act of being touched by the other." Theodor W Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

The shudder is art itself.

The Cusp of Invisibility

2009-06-11T15:20:00.001-07:00

Ben Cauchi, Loose Canvas, 2007 (tin type photograph)

Anne Noble, Window/Altar, 1978 (gelatine silver print)

Odilon Redon, Profil de Lumiere, 1886 (charcoal)

Bill Henson, Paris Opera Project, 1990-91

William Forsythe, Limbs Theorem

Thinking is more interesting than knowing, but less interesting than seeing.

J W Goethe

Knowingness is a state of soul which prevents shudders of awe.
Richard Rorty

Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist.'
Edgar Allan Poe

Within the vast, unknowable, ineffable darkness of existence, there exist glimmers, moments. On the cusp of invisibility the scintillas dance, light strikes an edge, a surface, a visage, a limb. A match is struck, phosphorescence. Lux et Nox. Fleetingly surface and depth inflect, the subtle bend of the meniscus, the tenderest touch. The cavernous blackness of the unknown pulls at the presumptions of light and knowledge, of seeing and knowing. Always already on the verge of swallowing the visible whole, the invisible, the dark, the deep is that which induces the shudders of awe, the beauty of the unseeable, that which exeeds mere imitation. To dance in the abyss, to reach into the distance, to touch the depth of darkness ...

Bill Henson, Paris Opera Project, 1990-91

The Evening of Things

2009-06-10T15:20:00.000-07:00

Evening St Petersburg, June 2007, JB

Each one stands alone at the heart of the earth
Pierced by a ray of sunlight
And soon it is evening.

Salvatore Quasimodo

Evening Christchurch, February 2009, JB

Over stubble-field and path
A black silence lurks in fear
Purest sky amid the branches
Only the brook runs silent and still

Fish and game soon slip away
Blue soul, darksome wandering
Soon severed us from loved ones, others.
Evening alters sense and image

From George Trakl's Autumn Soul

Landscape as State of Soul

2009-06-09T21:42:00.000-07:00

June 2009, JB

Paysage-état-de-l’âme: 'landscape as state of the soul', setting as mirror of self...

June 2009, JB

"Doesn't a life leave traces, traces that can attach themselves to others who pass through the aura of that life? Doesn't a place absorb the events it witnesses ...?" Dionne Brand, What We All Long For

Weakness, Decoration, Monumentality

2009-06-07T13:37:00.000-07:00

Theatre, Oamaru, January 2008, JB

Three ‘dirty words’ all at once: weakness, decoration and monumentality. Yet they are aspirations. Embedded within these terms is the most elegant of art, architecture, landscape. The lithe manoeuvres of Ignasi de Sola-Morales might seem mere semantics as he excavates the arcane brilliance of weakness and its attendants - decoration and monumentality. Sola-Morales's somersaults land deftly, however, delivering at once a cutting critique of the muscularity of modernity and a lyrical vision for a 'way out'.

Weakness first. As a critique of ‘strong’ thought, weakness represents an elusion of the domineering, fundamentalist dogma of modernism. Rooted in the writings of Gianni Vattimo, ‘weakness’ is proposed as a position of ironic strength, a critique of the monolithic nature of modernism. Rather than promoting the schism of subject and object, the most pronounced fall-out of the modern age, potency is found where the subject and object are continuous, are ‘fused’ -- within the work of art -- the most potent apprehension of the ‘aesthetic’.

‘Weak architecture’ is unswervingly ‘aesthetic’ -- which in itself may toll alarm bells. Aesthetic, like decoration and monumentality, has toxic overtones. Aisthesis simmers under the surface stain of the merely aesthetic, steering a course straight into the heart of the fully sensory and beyond, into the unknown terrain on the other side. Juhani Pallasmaa's weak or 'fragile archtitecture' is “contextual, multi-sensory, and responsive, concerned with experiential interaction and sensual accommodation. This architecture grows gradually, scene by scene, rather than quickly manifesting a simple, domineering concept.” This architecture of ‘humility’ is in marked contrast to the contemporary architecture he criticises as existing in a “climate of arrogance,” with an emphasis on “individual genius” focussed upon the “marketable image”.

And then to decoration. Abhorred by the modernists – Aldolf Loos’s dictum ‘ornament is a crime’ comes to mind – decoration is more than meets the eye. Sola-Morales performs an archaeogical dig and finds 'decorum' within decoration. Not the decorating of things -- not the ‘home décor’ and such -- but that thing itself, the architecture, the landscape, assumes a position of ‘weakness’ through acknowledging its place as decoration. This is in distinction from those things, those buildings, those thoughts, those narratives, which impose, which are relentless in their monolithic nature. A weak and decorative artwork assumes a position of decorum, of being dignified and considerate in behaviour – what Pallasmaa terms ‘humility’. Accepting a fragility in this way is not the same as acquiescing, but for a work of art, of architecture, it allows for an inhabitation of the work by the mind and the body. This softness, weakness, decorativeness, for a work “may possibly be the condition of its greatest elegance and, ultimately, its greatest significance and import.” (Sola-Morales)

And finally, monumentality. Not the monumentalising that is about setting colossal ideals into stone, the vision of the demiurge, or as Sola-Morales puts it, the imago Dei. Rather it is a resuscitation of the etymology of the term, to salvage ‘monitu’, recollection. Evoking Goethe’s words via Heidegger, Sola-Morales infuses the monumental with the sense of that which occurs within, rather than that which is imposed from without: “It is not necessary for the true always to take on material form, it is enough that it should flutter to and fro, like a spirit, promoting a kind of accord; as when the companionable pealing of a bell rings out, bringing us some little measure of peace.” In the artwork it as much the barely imperceptible reverberation that is telling as the impression of a strong visual presence. Monumentality is not about insistence and permanence, but is “bound up with the lingering resonance of poetry after it has been heard, with the recollection of architecture after it has been seen.”

Weakness is a position of strength, in the sense of strength as discipline and humility, rather than imposition and muscularity. The richness of being in place is not in the ‘aggressive and dominating’ but in the ‘tangential and weak’. It is about saying More with Less, about The Void, about the leap of faith ...

Shadow/Reflection - for Dan Graham, Central Park, March 2009, JB

See Ignasi de Sola-Morales, 'Weak Architecture' in Differences: Topographies of Contemporary Architecture

Juhani Pallasmaa, 'Architecture of Humility' in Encounters

We Also Live in the Night

2009-06-06T01:56:00.000-07:00

"... we also live in the night. Isn't it necessary, perchance, to turn our eyes toward it? ... I no longer have the black night, complete obscurity, before me; instead, it covers me completely, it penetrates my whole being, it touches me in a much more intimate way than the clarity of visual space."

Eugene Minkowski

Images: Passing in the Night, May 2009, JB

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.

We enter the circle after dark and are consumed by fire.

[Palindrome in Latin, on the ways of moths].

The Search for a Clearing

2009-06-04T01:19:00.000-07:00

Holzwege, June 2009, JB

“Wood” is an old name for forest. In the wood are paths that mostly wind along until they end quite suddenly in an impenetrable thicket.
They are called “woodpaths.” [holzwege]
Each goes it peculiar way, but in the same forest. Often it seems as though one were identical to another. Yet it only seems so.
Woodcutters and foresters are familiar with these paths. They know what it means to be on a woodpath.
Martin Heidegger, Holzwege

On Loss

2009-06-02T12:43:00.000-07:00

Ohio Impromptu, Samuel Beckett, 1980
Directed by Charles Sturridge, 2000
Reader: Jeremy Irons
Listener: Jeremy Irons

So the sad tale a last time told they sat on as though turned to stone. Through the single window dawn shed no light. From the street no sound of reawakening. Or was it that buried in who knows what thoughts they paid no heed? To light of day. To sound of reawakening. Buried in who knows what profounds of mind. Of mindlessness. Whither no light can reach. No sound. So sat on as though turned to stone. The sad tale a last time told. Nothing is left to tell.
Samuel Beckett

Reader reads to Listener, a tale of loss, of the enigmatic 'dear name'. Listener attempts to avert the inexorable descent towards an end, to somehow induce an eternal pause, through his tapping, knocking, to require Reader to re-read, an infinite re-telling of the tale. The looping back, re-stitching, backtracking, spirals in a suspension of time, until the close, the sudden jolt ... a knock ... 'Nothing is left to tell' ... ... terminal, black, the words hollow into a pit.

The complex of melancholia behaves like an open wound, drawing to itself cathetic energies ... from all directions, and emptying the ego until it is totally impoverished.
Sigmund Freud

[Thanks Bruno]

Remote Sensing

2009-06-01T12:49:00.000-07:00

Ascent of Little Mount Peel, June 2009, JB

This new bright day is the twentieth of February 2108, and these men and women are members of the New Zealand Re-Discovery Expedition to North America. Spared by the belligerents of the Third World War -- not, I need hardly say, for any humanitarian reason, but simply because, like Equatorial Africa, it was too remote to be worth anybody's while to obliterate -- New Zealand survived and even modestly flourished in an isolation which, because of the dangerously radioactive condition of the rest of the world, remained for more than a century almost absolute.

Aldous Huxley, Ape and Essence, 1949

Way Finding

2009-05-28T01:47:00.000-07:00

Portal, Dunedin North Cemetery, May 2009, JB

In the passing of things is also a liberation. Even that which is most loved can weigh heavily. An idea, a theory, a place, a person. The realisation of absence brings a certain latitude within the compass of the self. The passage of that which is loved is thus both a pit and a portal.

The liberation that comes with absence is vertiginous. But the gift is in what you give away, what you allow to depart. Whether the old cliché of love ('set it free') or in the setting aside of the manacles of theory, crossing the threshold is fearful. To lose something and to be lost are not necessarily one and the same.

Losing follows loosing. The occlusion of one oculus, the closing of an o, leads elsewhere, another way. Exceeding a diffident disengagement, the committed contemplation of absence is not for the fainthearted. The way through leads to other realms, not to nothing, or at least to a kind of 'nothing' that is something, that which ripples with the numinous, within underground seams of awe...

Absences are new presences.

[For an Absent Friend]

The Beauty of Loss

2009-05-27T00:55:00.000-07:00

“…this film is my dream about New Zealand, this make-believe country that seems almost empty of people, where love stories are played out in silence and loneliness ... where the land is like a vast quilt of fields, where life seems perfect but we find ways to make ourselves unhappy…” Harry Sinclair on The Price of Milk

Otago, May 2009, JB

"... melancholy would not be so much the regressive reaction to the loss of the love object as the imaginative capacity to make an unobtainable object appear as if lost..." ... "the strategy of melancholy opens a space for the existence of the unreal..." Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas