Poussin's Humour

1. GLOMM HERE to ETERNITY

1   Glomm Here to Eternity - The Musical! 

 

Prologue.

 

[Voice-over, montage of picturesque concrete buldings, sun-bathed campus with cheerful students, brilliantly lit laboratory scenes, small but comfortable student cell-accommodation. 1950s band arrangement of Gaudeamus Igitur faintly heard between paragraphs].

 

In a distant galactic depression in the near future, new education Provider Wigg that has been taken over by Dauern, becomes in a short time a market-leader in online training seminars, with a broad global corporate shareholding, now named EwigDauern. The flagship product-line is the full-time Doctorhood, the famous crimson satin, with bright blue trim, for seven years of fees.

 

Every year students fill in their questionnaires for computer-examined grading, with a small panel for personal comments on teaching quality & pledge of commitment to the Provider.

 

The terms for obtaining grades are stated in the contract, notably giving up all rights to copyright in anything they have said, whatever, which is routinely recorded by their supervisors. Anything whatever that they have published through Ewigbook is of course the Provider’s copyright. All research results whatsoever belong to the corporation for use in whatsoever projects in the real world they can sell them to.

 

By the second year, deals between students & supervisors (who are only paid a small retainer) yield good earnings in payments to their charitable trusts. Governments of all stripes are guarantors of quality & keen buyers of the appropriate research when it has a symbiotic fit with their programmes. Corporations are also notable patrons, buying the research they need when they apply to government for contracts.

 

[to be continued]

 

 

ex- post - ulations 1

[I thought it might be useful to save some recent ephemera, Facebook posts]

1.  There are only 2 notable 1930s shop buildings in Highbury - 2 photos to come, the rest is nothing special at all & all covered in the signs of commercial 'culture'- no use talking it up as another Napier. There is some more way down towards Birkenhead Point among the old villas built for workers at Chelsea Sugar Refinery. I'll post photos of the 2 so-called "Art Deco" buildings. 

 

2.    Frances Hodgkins 'fauve' water-colour to go with Matisse's musical moments - I've just tried posting a link to a photo of it, but Auckland Art Gallery's PRIVACY settings deprive me of opportunity to post it on fb - AAG call it, wrongly, The Piano Lesson & when I tell them so they do not respond at all. [Tony Green, Emeritus Professor, Art History, University of Auckland] It is easily findable on google [Frances Hodgkins, Piano Lesson.] On the left people playing a 4-hands piano piece. [Who ever heard of piano lessons on a leisurely summer afternoon, with 'family' & 'friends' talking &/or reading around them?  Even my comment online to the gallery has been removed. Try this inserted today in this typepad file http://www.aucklandartgallery.com/the-collection/browse-artwork/15520/the-piano-lesson

Gordon Walters with 'Te Whiti'

3.     "Te Whiti", Gordon Walters - in next show at Gow Langsford ---how cd anyone seriously miss the coded commentary on black/white relations in many of his paintings - in this one, dominant assortment of whites in the centre, blacks pushed to the edges - "FUSION of 2 cultures", what a joke! [Yelling about appropriation missed the point because the work was taken to be just Europe-based international abstraction]

That's why Herbin was important for GW - painting's 'plastic alphabet' [see I Buchanan's useful essay in "GW: Order & Intuition" (Walters Publication, Auckland, 1989]

 I know abt the titles: this is about critical blindness of formalist/idealist thinking to 'representational/symbol/coded' readings of the paintings [irrespective of titles]. Likewise, blindness to what for Herbin was important - a kind of coding by colours & forms as if there were sometimes implicit intellectual categories - see my essay in same book for an earlier version of what I'm saying. [Some titles, I believe were Maori words used as street names. Where Robert got 'arbitrary as street signs', I don't know. Or is that you paraphrasing him. & Street signs are not arbitrary, often silhouette-pictorial, or well-established conventional signs used as a 'language' ]. There was behind the blindness an attempt to promote Walters [abstract] & demote local, 'nationalist' 'subjective' 'expressionist' ''preacher-prophetic' McCahon.

4.    

Old Choral Hall once had columns under the portico, but when the building was restored by the Uni works dept .- no surprise: the columns were too hard [or too expensive] to do so they left them out -- hence a classical pediment apparently unsupported. That's what happens if you ignore art history.