Tetherd Cow Ahead

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s science news pages are currently carrying a story about the discovery of a ‘rogue’ planet⁽ⁱ⁾ ‘wandering all alone through deep space without a host star’. As far as such stories go, it’s an interesting astronomy tidbit, evoking, in the words of Philippe Delorme from France’s Institute of Planetology and Astrophysics, a ‘striking image of orphaned worlds, drifting in the emptiness of space’.

The editors of the ABC science pages⁽ⁱⁱ⁾, however, have taken the view that readers will not have the wits nor imagination to be able to conjure up the striking image for themselves, and so have helpfully provided an artist’s impression to help them along.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾

I am not a big fan of the artist’s impression.

How much does this ‘impression’ tell you about the reality of the event in question? Would you say that it’s reasonable to expect that, should you be able to hop in a fast spaceship and fly off to planet CFBDSIR2149 (as it is catchily named), this artist’s impression would give you a vague idea of what you might see? This romantic milky sapphire marble swimming in a luminous sea of misty cerulean stars? Well, my friends, you’d be mightily disappointed. CFBDSIR2149 does not orbit any sun, and so does not reflect any light. In addition, it does not emit much, if any, visible light of its own either, being detected as it was by M. Delorme, via infrared radiation. The Wikipedia entry on CFBDSIR2149 has this to say:

In visible light the object is so cool that it would only shine dimly with a deep red colour when seen close-up.

All things considered, here is a better artist’s impression of what you might see should you ever be in the close proximity of CFBDSIR2149.

Yep. It’s never going to feature on the ’10 Most Visually Impressive Planets You Must Visit Before You Die’ list, that’s for sure.

So what use, actually, is this artist’s impression? It tells us nothing at all about the reality of CFBDSIR2149,^(iv) substituting actual facts with a whole lot of visual speculation and even just plain old untruths. Why not paint a picture of the Death Star or a Borg Cube – ‘impressionistically’ speaking, either would be just as informative. Worse still, whatever mental image we might have formed of a darkened planetary body drifting forlornly across the unimaginable dark nothingness of the interstellar void is now indelibly replaced by the fantasy of an azure Xmas bauble that has no relation to anything.

Here is an artist’s impression of what I believe should be the fate of editors who indulge in artist’s impressions.^(v)

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Footnotes:

1. Is it just me, or does the term ‘rogue planet’ automatically conjure for anyone else Wagnerian-type music and sinister intentions? I mean, it’s not like it set out to storm the universe and take no prisoners. Why is it not simply an ‘orphan’ planet, or a ‘lost’ planet? What’s actually rogue about it? [↩]
2. Along with just about every other outlet carrying the story… [↩]
3. It is worth noting here that when the story first went up, the image was presented without the explanatory caption. [↩]
4. C’mon! Astronomers! Where are the days of imagination when planets had names? Are we to expect that if you were doing the solar system anew we’d be living on 3 and sending little rovers off to 4? How BORING is that? [↩]
5. Yes, I am aware of the recursive nature of what I did there. [↩]

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Violet Towne and I sometimes like to venture out on the weekend to one of the many places in Melbourne-and-surrounds where we might take in some of that magical stuff which is given the name ‘art’. One of our very favourite such venues, the TarraWarra Museum of Art is not even too far from where we live, and it was there we trundled last Saturday to experience their ‘Sonic Spheres’ exhibition, “an assemblage of contemporary Australian visual artworks engaged with music, sound and voice”.

TarraWarra, a privately funded public visual arts gallery, is one of the few of its kind in Australia, and is a purpose-built art museum situated among vineyards in the Yarra Valley. It’s a lovely place. It always maintains a high standard of exhibition and as is usual, our visit there provided an appropriately diverting & thoughtful hour or so. But I am not, Faithful Acowlytes, going to pontificate on art in this post, something for which I can sense palpable gratitude out there in Cowland.

No, what I want to talk about today is the survey which were handed upon our arrival at the gallery, and which we were asked to complete on our departure.

In my experience, surveys can be divided into two kinds:

1: Surveys where the point is to find out something useful.
2: Surveys where the point is to get a bunch of diffuse and obfuscated data that can be read in any way the surveyor chooses.

You know I wouldn’t be writing this post if it was the #1 variety that VT and I faced, pencils ready, at the end of our visit. I wish I’d snaffled a copy away for accuracy’s sake, because I will unfortunately have to go from memory as I attempt to draw you a picture of the confusion that beset me as I tried to answer as truthfully as I was asked.

The first portion of the survey annoyed the crap out of me because it was full of the kinds of questions that tried to stick me in a pigeonhole as a certain kind of person:

•Would you consider yourself the type of person who visits TarraWarra art museum?⁽ⁱ⁾

Thinks: Well, no. I got lost on the road, saw the sign that said ‘Art Gallery’ and thought I’d come in to see if glimpsing a Pollock might refresh my sense of direction.

•Do you like to be among the kinds of people who visit TarraWarra art museum.

Thinks: No! I wish they would jolly well stop those people from coming here, so me and my friends could come instead.

And so forth.

But then came the section that was the kind of thing that makes my Grumpy Old Man antennae start waving around like those of a grasshopper on acid:

•If the TarraWarra Museum was a person, would you say it was (check all that apply):

☐ Charming

☐ Entertaining

☐ Outgoing

☐ Interesting

☐ Intelligent

Acowlytes, I was forced to scribble my incredulity on the page at this point. When the creators of a survey decide that by anthropomorphising an institution this will help reveal something useful about said institution, they’ve ventured well into cloud cuckoo land and thrown away their compass.⁽ⁱⁱ⁾

The problem with even beginning to attempt to sensibly answer the questions posed above, is that you are on EXACT LOGICAL FOOTING with the following:

•If the TarraWarra Museum was a person (check all that apply):

☐ Would you ask it out for a drink?

☐ What colour eyes do you think it would have?

☐ Should you give up your seat for it on a bus?

☐ Do you think it would be appropriate dinner company for the Fire Station, the Public Library and the Chinese Restaurant?

It doesn’t matter how I try to frame it, I can’t see any possible way that any quantity of answers to this kind of question can provide data that might be helpful in making your art museum a better place – or even a controllably different place, for that matter. There is simply no sensible yardstick by which to measure things. Should the majority of respondents determine, for instance, that if the TarraWarra Art Museum was a person it would be charming and intelligent with a dash of insouciance, what the hell are you going to do with that information? Bash that damned insouciance out of it by removing the sand-blasted glass panels on the gift shop doors? If you thought TarraWarra-the-person was a little short on, oh, charisma, say, could you correct that by installing some crazy paving at the front entrance? You can, I trust, see my perplexity with this scenario.

And really, if you just can’t see your way around it, and you really must anthropomorphise your Art Museum, at the very least allow your respondents to have a creative personal say:

•If the TarraWarra Museum was a person:

☑ Other (please use your own words, or make a drawing):

I imagine the TarraWarra Museum as a somewhat eccentric spinster with a penchant for French rosé. It has a good, if slightly peculiar, sense of humour and prefers chairs that face the window. It laughs a little too loudly and self-consciously at other people’s jokes, has a morbid fear of stick insects and visits a distant cousin in Ibiza every couple of years out of a misplaced sense of familial obligation.

At least reading the results of the survey would be entertaining. They might even make an amusing artwork.

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Footnotes:

1. These questions were all couched in the wonderful ‘sliding scale’ terms that we are now so accustomed to seeing in these types of surveys, which only serves to cause me to want to unfailingly answer ambivalently in order to confuse the people trying to get some kind of useful result. If you’re asking a direct question, think about what that question should be, phrase it in a way that matters, and accept candid results. What is it with this confounded equivocating?! [↩]
2. Needless to say, the survey presented no check box options on this question for ‘Boring’ or ‘Irritating’ or Pretentious’ or ‘Eccentric’. You can see, I surmise, the inherent brainlessness of this pursuit. [↩]

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Over the weekend, Violet Towne and I visited the Monash Gallery of Art to see an exhibition of photographs by Anton Bruehl. Bruehl was born in Australia, but made his career in New York where he became a favourite of the advertising world, creating photographs for Vanity Fair, Vogue and other high profile magazines. I always thought Bruehl was quite famous, but am dismayed to find that he doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia entry. You will almost certainly have seen his iconic photograph of Marlene Dietrich:

I really like Bruehl’s highly contrived and art-directed style and I think it has gone on to inform artists as diverse as David Lynch and Pierre et Gilles. The highlight of this exhibition for me, though, was some work Bruehl did for Vanity Fair, photographing the ‘Fashions of the Future’: clothing visions from designer Gilbert Rhodes. This is Rhodes’ speculation for the Man of the Future:

And here is that very man in the flesh, as realised by Rhodes and capture on film by Bruehl:

Is that awesome or what? The best thing here is, of course, that Rhodes got hardly any of it right. Well, I guess there is still a good part of the century to go, but you know what I’m saying… I suppose there are disposable socks (those ones they give you on planes) and the ‘antenna snatching radio out of the ether’ could charitably be interpreted to be the one in your iPhone, but the curly beard and the baggy onesie tucked into those disposable socks have yet to materialize. As for the utility belt, well, even Batman had trouble making that seem like a good idea.

I quite took to the Man of the Future’s jaunty disregard for anyone’s opinion of his haute couture, but I was rather more enamored of Rhodes’ vision for the Woman of the Future:

Alright! Now we’re talking!

I’m afraid, however, that I was so overcome by the prospect of what we bearded, antenna-sporting, disposable sock-wearing blokes have to look forward to in the next few years that my hand was shaking rather a lot when I tried to snap a shot of Rhodes’ and Bruehl’s vision of said woman.

It seems that, for a year or two at least, chaps, we’ll just have to live in anticipation.

My good friend Nick Stathopoulos is exhibiting the second in his Toy Porn series – paintings of the toys we know and love from childhood. If you’re in Sydney, you should really go along and see them in the flesh… er… in the acrylic. I’ve seen some of the first series at firsthand: they are truly beautiful artworks.

July 26 – August 13
NG Art Gallery
Upper Level
3 Little Queen Street
Chippendale NSW 2008
Sydney Australia

The paintings are all for sale, but I hear they’re being snapped up fast. Damn you empty piggy bank!!!

Or, How To Get Product Placement on Tetherd Cow Ahead Without Even Trying

A couple of weeks back I told you the story of the tragic event in my youth that undoubtedly thwarted a brilliant artistic career; namely the loss of my beautiful set of Derwent pencils. To my surprise, the charming Rebecca from Derwent in the UK read that post and kindly offered to send me some Derwents, which I’m pleased to report she did. They arrived in the post a few days ago.

The look of the pencils has changed somewhat – gone are the rainbow hues, replaced with an earthy brown with colourful tips (they’re not really blue like they appear in the arty HipstaMatic⁽ⁱ⁾ shot above). I’m pleased to say, though, that the pencils themselves retain their waxy luxury and I aim to take a little outing somewhere over the next few weeks, to sit and draw, something I have not done in many years.

Wherever I venture, you can be sure that this time I will not leave my Derwents on the bus.

Thank you Rebecca, for the lovely coda to my childhood story.
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Footnotes:

1. Dang. Secondary product placement! I should be getting kickbacks! [↩]

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Last Monday was a public holiday in the US of A so I got that rarest of things on a Hollywood film schedule – a day off. To celebrate, I decided that I would make my way to the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown LA and catch myself a little kulture. I have to confess: I am a little at sea with modern art. Some of it I think is beautiful and moving, but there are vasts rafts of it that to me just look like pretentious crap. I don’t know how you are supposed to tell the difference.

MOCA is currently showing a retrospective of an artist named Arshile Gorky whose work just seems to my eye like a semi-competent blend of Matisse, Miro and Tanguy, with none of the originality of any of those great painters. I am probably showing my colours as a Philistine of outstanding magnitude by saying that, but since I shoot my mouth off about everything else here on The Cow, why stop now? Here’s a Gorky that’s like something by Joan Miró painted (but never finished) by a blindfolded and inebriated Yves Tanguy:

It was probably undignified of me, but as I walked around the exhibition, I kept having the thought that Americans only embraced Gorky because they were jealous that they didn’t have any of the aforementioned European painters.⁽ⁱ⁾ I know that there is a lot of borrowing and re-borrowing in the art world, but this particular instance seems so close to plain plagiarism that it baffles me that Gorky has the reputation he has.

Wandering onward through the nicely laid-out MOCA galleries I was further perplexed by the work of Craig Kauffman – plexiglass creations in bright colours with attached artist statements that were as nonsensical as anything ever written by Edward Lear.

Reading the little cards next to each work, I had the overwhelming impression that Kauffman was pulling everybody’s legs. Which is not to say that he hasn’t actually made some good works,⁽ⁱⁱ⁾ but rather (as is, in my experience often the case) that his justification for creating them seems predicated on convincing less intellectually-inclined people that he is doing something profound by using elliptical language and vague philosophical pontifications. Art waffle-speak is as abundant as political waffle-speak, and that’s saying something. I have yet to see an artist statement that says something along the lines of ‘Oh, I dunno – I just started painting something and this is how it came out…’ God forbid that an artist might be proceeding purely along the lines of intuition.⁽ⁱⁱⁱ⁾

Perhaps the work I liked the very least came from James Rosenquist:

Now I suppose there are many and varied reasons why this artist is considered worthy of being displayed in one of the premier art institutions of the USA, but frankly, buggered if I can see ‘em. To me, this work, and most of the other Rosenquists on display just look like the kind of thing that a lazy high school art student with little talent would whip up the day before it was due for marking. I mean… can anyone explain to me what’s good about this? Anyone?

It has none of the majesty and gravitas of Mark Rothko:

…or the passion and power of Jackson Pollock:

…or even the wit and elegance of some of the lesser known artists also on display, like Antoni Tàpies:

…or Louise Nevelson:

…or Kenneth Price:

…whose works all show imagination and thought and originality and … well… skill.^(iv) The thing I enjoyed most in the museum was its sizeable collection of the photographic works of Robert Frank. I have, of course, seen Frank’s work before, but seeing them here, in America, so beautifully presented, made them very moving indeed. My favourite work at MOCA? This Robert Frank portrait of a Jehovah’s Witness (it’s a bit hard to tell in this small jpeg, but the key to this image is the ‘Awake’ magazine that the man is holding):

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Footnotes:

1. The fact that he had a miserable life and then an untimely and unpleasant death probably added to the cachet. [↩]
2. I have seen some Kauffman that I quite liked, but MOCA doesn’t have any of those ones. [↩]
3. The reason for this is plain to me – if you want someone to buy your work, then the pressure is on to convince them that its genesis is something more than just your artistic muse speaking to you in incomprehensible-to-the-common-person muse language. [↩]
4. One thing I noticed when making this post was that rendering all these works to small jpegs has a weird consequence: the ones I disliked in the gallery are improved by the process, and the ones I liked don’t seem quite as impressive. It is truly a case of ‘you had to be there!’ [↩]

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