faded flower

A series of four tapestries I created after graduating from the College of Fine Arts COFA with my Master of Design (Hons) degree in 2003: The second is called Whose Beauty is Past Change, from a magnificent lyric, Pied Beauty, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. A gay man who became a Jesuit priest, he began to write poetry in an eccentric new way he called ‘sprung rhythm’, his attempt to ‘rinse and wring the ear’ (his words) of the mushy predictability that Victorian poetry had become. His great personal preoccupation, (who knows how much it was predicated on his awareness of his sexuality?), was that nature is variegated and strange, and in its bizarre unpredictability it shouts a magnificent ‘Gloria’ to the Creator, however people may characterise that concept.

When I gave a talk on my work at ANU in 2005, the person who introduced me at the lectern, currently the Dean of the School of Arts, spoke from his own research into indigenous bark paintings of the Northern Territory. There, he said, a work’s spirituality, strength and power are measured by a concept the indigenous painters translated as ‘shimmer’. The speaker thought my work shimmered.

Whose Beauty is Past Change, 2003, woven tapestry, 50 cms H X W. This work was included in the 2004 Blake Prize for Religious Art, Sir Hermann Black Gallery, Uni of Sydney Union.

But I pre-empted my narrative sequence. 3.1.2.4. The first work was Colours of Night, 2003, woven tapestry, 50 cms H X W. This was followed by Valentine: ROZ. I had completed my degree that was prompted by two events, my mother’s death in 1992 and cardiac surgery (aortic valve replacement, the architect of that work was the internationally acclaimed Prof Richmond). I was contemplating a creative emptiness, that typically sets in after something major has been clarified and resolved. At that moment, post degree, my household was in total disarray, as my precious Tonkinese cat, prince Chook decided to succumb to an ear infection and first lost most of his functions then died. I nursed him through a bizarre time, from which I can only marvel at relatives who nurse an elderly loved one suffering from dementia. The consciousness seems one sided; only the carer suffers, shrek.

However, as that little butterfly called Hope emerged from Pandora’s box, an exciting new way of weaving presented itself to me. Earlier blog chapters make clear different modes of loading weft yarn onto the loom: my earliest was to throw little gestures, cat’s paws, tongues, marks of colour.

Here instead I backtracked constantly, like a voice and continuo, a colour asserting its presence but echoed immediately by the background. I have to admit the influence of Swedish tapist Annika Eckdahl, who uses the houndstooth join between adjacent colour areas. I was able to study her work at Newcastle Uni, when my friend Brett Alexander invited her there as artist in residence. My work appeared in the Helen Lancaster curated show Colours of Night at Fairfield Gallery.

Valentine: ROZ, 2003, woven tapestry, 50 cms H X W. I wanted to affirm the presence of my mother as a mediumistic muse in my work. I found a primary school report card where my mother had signed Roz Veenstra, a busy shortening of her gloriously floral name Rozalia. I copied the written gesture onto my ancient OHP. My current mode of weaving was felicitously scriptlike, going backwards and forward with every new gesture of colour. I managed to create some interesting shading among the different tones of red. And things cardiac were still foremost in my consciousness.

Whose Beauty is Past Change was the third of this quartet. Lastly, I returned to photocopies of illustrations of Idrija lace that I had obtained during my month’s study at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum Ljubljana in 2002. During post-op complications at the decrepid Page building of Royal Prince Alfred Hospital I used to take my cd player onto the 11th floor balcony and bask in the open air and sunshine. The musical accompaniment still fills me with a delicious horror. Depeche Mode’s One Caress is forever coloured musique noire, as a result. My other constant musical companion was Frank Sinatra’s album Wee Small Hours. ” Like a faded flower, when your lover has gone”. Please ignore the seemingly Oedipal reference, but all the lace flowers of my mother’s upbringing and cultural tradition recreated in my tapestry were my tribute to an extraordinary woman, strong, vulnerable, alone, but a fierce feminist, earth mother of six sprawling children.

Faded Flower, 2004, woven tapestry, 50 cms H X W. That was the title I settled on for my last of four works. I exhibited it in the Xmas show at Craft ACT gallery Canberra in 2005, at the end of my year as sessional lecturer of tapestry at the School of Arts Textile workshop ANU. The wonderful person who proposed me for that job was Valerie Kirk, one of the best known tapestry artists in Australia. She took a year’s leave to create three splendid tapestries commemorating ANU scientists who had won the Nobel prize. She looked at this work and remarked on its ‘crispness’, no faint praise from a master of the craft.

A comment posted on LinkedIn yesterday: WOW, YOUR WORK IS GREAT!
Hi Anton, your tapestries are so honest, raw and edgy. Sometimes I despair that fiber art is so conventional and you really break the mold.

retro 2 my family

On the decade anniversary of my mother’s death, I decided to return to academia, to complete a studio based thesis on the migration of my family to Australia after World War 2 had ended. My mother had gone to work in Germany and was declared a displaced person when the fighting ceased. I used her ID photo taken by the International Refugee Organisation in my art work. My father was doubly orphaned in his preteens, he decided to enlist in the Dutch army and was shipped to Batavia to fight the insurrection. He was awarded the service medal, the star for order and peace, the ereteken voor orde en vrede.

The above works complete my family narrative with my parents’ transit from Bathurst through Cowra [where I was born] to Scheyville Migrant camp. We were then released, our status changed to that of citizens, dad found local employment, we lived in a stone house outside Pitt Town, on the bank of the Hawkesbury River. My immediate visual improvement was to acquire a sailor suit [in honour of the PopEye cartoon?]; this features in my two button works that follow.

Mum, 30 cms H X W, 2008.

Mum, Cowra, 80 cms H X 50 cms W, 2000.

Baby Photo, 30 cms H X W, 2008.

Scheyville, 60 cms H X 40 cms W, 2000.

Scheyville 2, 80 cms H X 60 cms W, 2007.

Dad, 75 cms H X 30 cms W, 2007.

retrospective 1 mardi gras themes

I’d like to present my work of the last 15 years or so. The following pieces are similar to what preceded, shown in 2 Sydney solo shows and 2 Mardi Gras themed shows at the Object Galleries at Customs House, Age of Consent 1999, reviewed by Bruce James in the Sydney Morning Herald, and Material Boys Unzipped 2000, which then toured nationally [Vic, Tas, Qld].

[Adam] “& Steve”, uses a magnetic resonance image, the rib, to comment on fundamentalist based criticism of same sex unions. 30 cms H X W, 2006.

Desiring This, 2001, 95 cms H X W, [Desiring this man’s scope and that man’s art.]

Odalisk in the Object Galleries show Material Boys 2000, was reviewed by Ben Genocchio of the Australian, as a witty take on Ingres. 90 cms H X 60 cms W, 1999.

No country for old men, was my belated contribution to the Sydney Aids quilt project. I combined tapestry pieces, buttons, objects and print. 6 ft H X 3 ft W, 2008.

Harlequin, 2005 uses de-constructed Harris tweed yard, I dismembered a man’s jacket, bought in a vintage shop. Yes, its surface is hairy, it’s a bear of a work with a good heart. 45 cms H X W, 2005.

Manly Faery, 30 cms H X W, buttons and objects, quotes the 1980’s Australian Crawl song Reckless, As the Manly Ferry cuts its way to Circular Quay. Circular Quay as the historians will narrate, was the site of Capt Phillip’s landing inside Sydney Harbour. It is by default the culture precinct with the Museum of Contemporary Art and the fabulous House of White Sails, the Sydney Opera House. 30 cms H X W, 2007.

Dragon Bite, woven in 2002, entirely in the beautiful city of Ljubljana, capitol of my mother’s country of birth Slovenia. The dragon, emblem of the city, features as exquisite wrought iron detail on the bridge in the old city, designed by that amazing renaissance man Jose Plecnik. The fallen figure of course is a homage to El Greco’s Laocoon. 30 cms H X W, 2003.

Diver, 1982, was acquired by the Sydney Textile Museum as the 1983 annual award. It is based on the Bronski Beat song Small Town Boy. When it was shown at the Craft Australia Expo Sydney Centrepoint in 1983 it reminded an eastern European viewer of Lenin. She was unamused. 80 cms H X 50 cms W.

An unexhibited work, You Bloody Poofs R Awol, Snarls Sarge, is a flashback to cadet training at boarding school, dies ires, annus horribilis. We had gathered in the late afternoon, when our sarge noticed two school mates creep out of the bush, wearing broad cheeky grins. He interpreted their absence angrily. 95 cms H X W, 2007.

There is a beautiful photo of Elvis enlisting and being given an innoculation shot. His white tshirt is lifted to the shoulder, he looks fragile, delicate. 60 cms H X 40 cms W, 2007.

Michael Jackson, 30 cms H X W, 2008.

confess my sins

I’ve begun reading Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe. It’s intense, vital, quite like my own journey through Europe in 1979 and again in 2002. Early in the novel is a scene where the Melbourne based Greek gay man returns to Athens; on a beat he stumbles upon two young men bashing a younger boy; the violence of this narrative and my own witness of gay fragging in the Zappeion Gardens in Athens provoked the following blog chapter.

A novel I often reread is Patrick White’s Vivisector; there the socially inarticulate painter Hurtle Duffield travels with his Greek lover to the island of her origins. She is contused with unresolvable sins & complexes. He sits with her at a cafe neon, while she complains about life, he looks out and sees a rooster dancing in golden, illuminated dust, but he cannot help her, cannot convey the vision except later, on a painting in his secluded studio.

This forum is my confessional; I remember the last, stupid time I made use of a Roman Catholic booth designed for the same function. I’ve found more illumination in porno booths in Kings Cross.

I remember one afternoon I accompanied a friend to a movie matinee at a theatre in Paddo as part of the Sydney G&L Mardi Gras; prior to the screening there was some nonsense in the foyer which was crowded with couples of all sorts; I remember a lot of bisexual goings on, one young guy seemed to think I was hetero, he wondered aloud what I was doing there.

My friend & I both lived in Potts Point/Elizabeth Bay, so after the film we cut through the back of Darlo and were walking along Darlo Road a block from the big Coke sign. Up ahead was some commotion, a blond guy was being punched by two guys. As we approached they desisted, and walked away. They were two Arabic louts, they’d used some karate blows on the unfortunate guy. As they walked past us they answered our puzzled enquiring expression with a feeble explanation: ” he got what he was asking for”. Their victim was slight, clearly incapable of defending himself. As the louts walked off, the guy got himself together and ran off. I’ve been rehearsing, over and over, why my foot did not jut out and heavily trip one of the gutless thugs onto the concrete pavement. But it took me that second too long to realise this was just another gay bashing. I DID NOTHING.

In a poem WH Auden writes: “that girls are raped, that two boys knife a third”. Women and gays, we are the butt of things done by thuggish brutes. Worst, we may well have been trained, being consistently abused by a hetero-sexist society, to be powerless. This weekend I started to watch the movie TROY with Brad Pitt and Eric Bana. I switched the movie off, after the scene when Paris attempts to engage Menelaus in single combat, but instead is seriously wounded and crawls back frantically to clutch at his brother Hector’s legs and pleads to be rescued. As a railway guy once said to me: we were both lovers not fighters. I can get angry with words, but I do not understand the psychotic lust to do violence that some men possess.

By the laws of karma, we each one of us succumb to the effects of our own actions; I have already seen that happen in my own life. I don’t know what the two thugs have become. A friend of mine did time in Parklea prison, he says the general population is a well-guarded zoo of indescribable human ferocity. May we seal the door where evil dwells. And to the blond guy I could not help that afternoon, if you come to read this, I am so sorry for your injury. I somehow feel I could have done something, but what? Back to black, black, black…

judge not

Just read that Facebook removed a page belonging to a New Jersey teacher who believes gays are a perversion of nature. Kudos to Facebook. She’s been teaching for 12 years; how many young minds has she blighted with this mad rubbish? The director of her area seemed none too concerned. Perhaps the fundamentalist religious right feel that even by putting our noses above the parapet we are performing acts of audacious social engineering. This seems to provoke them to ever more feverish evangelical rhetoric. Holy Moses, I call you Holy Moses. [Thank you, Washington, sometimes you just have to let art wash over you.] Etc, calmly now, deep breaths.

The bigot teacher from New Jersey, clearly of no great intellect, is basing her evangelical crusade on the old book, Leviticus perhaps? There are jokes, really not very funny ones about whether that book authorises me to keep Canadian slaves, like, a Mountie under my bed?? It was surely the text that allowed Terreblanche and his apartheit buddies in South Africa to keep the indigenous people in bondage.

I have repeated in many blog chapters that I was raised an evangelical catholic until the local priest decided to fiddle in my shorts. My last gasp at understanding the religious texts on which I was raised was inspired by a doco set in that disputed mountainous border area between India and Pakistan. Kashmir is where the tomb of a middle eastern prophet is to be found. His name was Issa, three lamas rode on camels, following the astronomical signs of his birth. I can see why no one in the fundamentalist religions bothers with his teachings. Blessed are the poor?? We need to amass wealth so our church can prosper. Blessed are the meek? How can we rant & rave effectively in front of the camera. Do good quietly, unobserved so no one sees you? Absurd. His really was the religion of non religion. No wonder Francis of Assisi followed his lead so lustrously.

Issa certainly was an artist’s teacher: look at the lilies of the field. Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed as one of these. A timely quote as the reddest lilies are trumpeting in my front garden.

As a self-help guru he said: look at the birds of the air and the wild creatures, they do not reap and spin, yet my father looks after them. They do not fret, nor worry about the morrow. Yet my father would not let one hair on your head be harmed. Of course, that is quoting his fave poet David.

Issa was a hippy, a cool dude… He was not respectable, in his company were the marginalised and the disregarded. He taught: do not judge. Sin no more. You simply cannot twist those examples into profitable templates of organised religious enterprises, incorporated.

I’ll go to bed now, wondering what the world would have looked like if we all followed his example. In my own case it is necessary to learn many things. But his vision is impeccable, pristine, calm, blue of a clear sky, gold of desert sands… AHHA. Sleep that knits the ravelled sleeve of care.

Today on the ABC Big Ideas format was a panel discussing the Family; as the presenter introduced them, it was plain that everyone’s body language excluded a Christian Family person. Originating, it seems, from the sub-continent, she made herself extra-ordinarily unpopular with an extended anecdote about lesbians, ending in an unfortunate note of laughing ridicule at the expense of women who love women. It was an unpleasant moment; where in the gospels could the precedent for such behaviour be found. Saul/Paul, of course, was extremely critical of gays; he was also it seems epileptic, masochistic etc. His sexual pathology would be a rich minefield. I prefer the sunnier teacher, who admired flowers and wild creatures, who talked to all, and only shunned hypocrisy and greed.

religious homophobia

The ABC ran their Q&A show tonight; it was extensively about gay rights. Precipitated by a video question from Josh Thomas the endearing comedian, the discussion went to various members of the panel: 1. a religious right conservative who was SO devious about the bits of the bible used to defend prejudice and hatred. Leviticus might be dismissed as old book, a rite of passage for a desert tribe seeking homeland. However, as the presenter Tony Jones said: if Jesus made no overt comment on gay relationships, isn’t that telling? To quote Saul/Paul is to delve into the S/M of Roman/Jewish relationships of the time, far more convoluted than a glib quote. As John Boswell expounded, it is a complex area.

2. Kristine Kennelly showed herself more liberated and generous than she appeared as NSW premier. All to her credit. However, the most telling speaker on the topic was Raymond Gaita, we almost did not get to hear his thoughts. The idiot christian right bigot had earlier thrashed the old line that a child’s upbringing needed a man and a woman: what couple has those supposed qualities in balance, many couples are a bizarre inversion of essentialist qualities, my own parents for instance, my mum like a lot of Yugoslav women was strident and forceful, while dad was emotional and reticent.

Gaita cut through all that waffle and said that to deny gay and lesbian couples the civic right of relationship recognition equal to all others in our democracy was to spread the noxious prejudice that gay love and lesbian love was not deep and genuine enough to nourish a child. He went further and declared that this amounted to racism. At this point he reached a place inhabited by other visionaries who are busy shaping a better future. One of those people was Mrs Martin Luther King [widow] who said that gays and lesbians today fight the struggle that her people fought in the 1960’s. The restrictions on our lives are the same prejudiced, cankerous restrictions called miscegenation, the foul law prohibiting people of different races from marrying. Gaita’s comments amounted to a demand for acceptance of the validity of gay men and lesbian women, and of course of all people of variegations inbetween. It was a beautiful moment, and had such a quality of quietly spoken but incontrovertible truth. As Keats said, Beauty is Truth.

I confess

Searching wikipedia cinema files today, I trawled through the I Confess file, film by Alfred Hitchcock, set in old Quebec. I saw it in my first year of high school; I’d been sent to a sacred heart seminary boarding school.

Last night’s episode of Big Bang Theory has Sheldon call his band of helpers C-men. “That doesn’t work for me.” says Howard. Seminary reminded me of it: the gospel injuction to spread the seed. We had two years of normal early high school education, I was privileged to be molded by superb teachers. The only privation, if it can be called that, was that silence was observed during evening meal, while someone read the first volume of Lord of the Rings. I had nightmares nightly as the company undertook its flight to the ford.

In chapel I observed the first year seminarians, who were secluded from the rest of the community. They observed complete silence; except that in chapel they sang, along with the rest of us, the hymns of even-song. During Passion Week, they swooned with a barely disguised erotic fervour, songs about the body of christ, some of which actually expressed the desire to merge with his beautiful body.

At the end of our lenten penances and privations we had a bit of an easter celebration. The treat was watching Hitchcock’s I Confess. For weeks thereafter, I was infatuated with Monty Cliff’s steely-sapphire blue eyes, though the film was B&W. I think I’d seen Raintree County, featuring that other pair of amazing oculars in contemporary cinema, Liz Taylor. But there was that Scorpionic magnetism of his gaze. The plot was complex; the topic was so sensitive for the catholic church, it was rewritten to the point of obfuscation.

At that time I was angelically PURE, with the burning intention to become a priest, despite the pedophillic attentions of the local catholic priest during primary school. For instance, I was unable to watch Cliff Richard’s squirmings in Summer Holiday.  BUT, once I’d succumbed to the sots and thralls of puberty the movie A Summer Place became my landmark icon of relationship lust. I managed, as all gay adolescents must, to transpose the MF dynamic into my own personal disposition. How life goes on.

gay as

In the previous chapter I mentioned someone commenting on Washington’s song Holy Moses, objecting to another opinion that she was like Lady Gaga. His words were: Lady Gaga is gay as balls…..

In Oscar Wilde’s time, even in my youth and adolescence, gay was the love that dare not say its name. I was often made to feel, whenever I added a gay perspective, that I intruded with my obsession and weighted innuendo, on a world that was simpler than how I saw it. It seems I was unnecessarily complicating things for people, [that’s a Sheldon insight, of Big Bang Theory; the attitude could be adjectivalised as “Sheldonian”]. Now this commentary by younger folk about “gay as”, even a panoramic view of cinema culture in the Celluloid Closet shows a process of naming and banishing by people uncomfortable with the “other”.

What reason can we offer such folk for our existence? On Spicks and Specks this week Annette Halloran the unacknowledged wife of the show’s presenter offered an anecdote of someone being bitchy to her, she pointedly identified the person as gay. Push them away! Identify them!! Target them.

I turn to Bagemihl’s book Biological Exuberance as a raison d’etre. He quotes indigenous cosmology, a Papuan tribe, for instance, believes that when things are gay around them the world is in a fertile phase. A lovely thought, it reminds me of a gay historian, who in his elegy for the handsome, creative guys who died painful and seemingly futile deaths during the epidemic, compared them to the often excessive profusion of nature, the spectacular marine efflorescence when the corals of the Great Barrier Reef spawn. The corals release their procreative essences simultaneously, they blend in a moonlit pearlescent underwater dance. Perhaps these allusions to the mysteries of the natural world [baby we’re nothing but mammals, let’s do it like they do on the discovery channel] is a futile exercise. The right-minded need no persuasion, others want to remain sceptical about natural processes like global warming. It takes an effort to feel part of the wild world, I guess. Gay as….

PS: In Big Bang Theory tonight, did Raj finally declare his love for Howard? Sitting on a park bench together, they negotiate Howard’s episodes of the roving eye, the event was to all intents a reconciliatory date set up by Howard to restore Raj’s good will. Aw shucks, let love rule.

the witnesses

On Sun night last, SBS showed The Witnesses, [07] starring Emmanuelle Beart, Julie Depardieu, Michel Blanc, as French culture seeks to assess the effect of the Aids epidemic. French movies are either hetero sex or the claustrophobia of seeming to be trapped inside a platonic dialogue. Well, this movie had me regretting my peevish previous chapter about possible Aids dementia. In the film. a near blind plwa has his friend guide him along the Seine by night, bombarded by son et lumiere from cruising tourist boats and wonderfully exaggerated neon explosions, then they go to the gay beat in the Bois de Bologne. Turns out the guy’s sister is a soprano singer in the opera. Next scene she comes out onstage to mourn him, in the Barberina solo from Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.

My friend the viol player and muso whizz says the solo starts Act 4, it’s a cavatina, a rocking-rhythmed song, a Venetian gondolier song, unusual for Mozart. The solo is not developed to the complexity of a full-grown aria, nevertheless it is moving.

Margaret are you grieving over golden grove unleaving…It is Margaret you mourn for… is how Gerard Manley Hopkins elegised. We have our expressionist memories of the 80’s and 90’s, and the ghosts live with us still. We are the witnesses.

And incidentally, to talk of Plato’s dialogues, a scholar has unravelled in his writings coded remarks that contradict the traditional interpretation of “platonic love”; nothing asexual or repressed or sublimated here, it turns out Plato may be the Buddha of sexual love, aspousing the middle path of sexual life, between denial and excess.

I cannot banish Washington’s clip Holy Moses from my mind: great choreography, well written. She has improved exponentially since I Believe You Liar. But she has to forget that bloke who done her wrong!!! Searching online for the clip I found reactions: someone compared her to Lady Gaga. Sorry, the latter would make a great clothes horse; does she dance well? Don’t know. But Washington does all the above and SHE CAN SING like a bird. As for the klutz who retorted to the above comment with Lady Gaga is gay as balls. Fella, you need to know using the expression “gay as” shows you to be a homophobic bigot. We have to get past all this label rubbish. “We must love one another or DIE!” as the great gay poet Auden sang……………….

loving washington

The most delightful creature, sylph, faery, in the universe.

Go to the ABC Spicks & Specks show on YouTube where she sings the Radiohead song Creep to the words of that 80’s guru [you can cure aids with my words] Louise Hay. Cry!! I shed a couple. Two gr8 things in contemporary music culture, coming together: her voice and Radiohead’s amazing Genet-like song. An act of worship. And Megan does not sing a wrong note, all extemporised, stunning performance. Not since Monroe is there such a glamorous yet modest soul.

That brings me to the feat of genius that good singers can accomplish: interpreting the songs of other artists. It puts the lie to the idea, so heavily promoted in rock circles, that music today is all about innovation and individuality. Washington’s ability to interpret other people’s songs is a joy. Like I Touch Myself. And when she does her own material, like Sunday Best, the gay touches are nice too.