Reading the Landscape

Colonial Ensign, Dunedin, July 2009, JB

Moon / Dust

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

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

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

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

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

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