Personage for animals

Can animals be afforded rights as a legal person and not just a legal thing?http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_wise_chimps_have_feelings_and_thoughts_they_should_also_have_rights
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Halmos - open library resource

This looks like a worthwhile art reference source ... "Halmos is pleased to announce the public launch of Library...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Tuesday, May 26, 2015

On show until June 14: Toorak Village Sculpture Prize

The Toorak Village Sculpture Prize will continue running until June 14. My work is on show at Nina Leon's Shoe Boutique...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Sunday, May 24, 2015

Puppy Love IV: mastering 'second position'

'Puppy Love IV: mastering second position'Another Strange Attractor emerged yesterday. Instead of experiencing the...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Sunday, May 24, 2015

A 'multinatural' perspective

Loads of mythopoetic imagery in this piece (and something here rings 'true' ... and if so, what are we extracting from...
Posted by Susie Marcroft on Sunday, May 24, 2015

More on DENISE GREEN ... (and Chaos Theory)

From the 1980s chaos was seen as an enemy by determinists,  randomness a force to be overcome or denied... For them, chaos was death and disorder, entropy and waste. The opposing faction however experienced chaos as so benevolent, the necessary matrix out of which arises spontaneously an infinity of variegated forms — a pleroma rather than an abyss — a principle of continual creation, unstructured, fecund, beautiful, spirit of wildness. These
scientists saw chaos theory as vindication of Quantum indeterminacy and Godel’s Proof, promise of an open-ended universe, Cantorian infinities of potential... chaos as health."
(from Ong’s Hat – The Beginning)

I've linked this positive view of Chaos Theory with Green's view of her artistic practice:

Metonymy, a term coined by the ethnologist Claude Levi-Strauss "... assigns no specific meaning to signs, as opposed to symbolism, which sets up a direct one-to-one correspondence between a sign and its referent, as in medieval iconography. Rather, it allows meaning to spread 'in all directions, absorbing and conjoining ever new aspects of reality (near and far, conscious and unconscious, present and past …)'. For Green, Aboriginal sand paintings—and, by association, her paintings—are less about form than about meaning; they are not about duality, but fusion and wholeness—an argument that emanates from traditional Eastern aesthetics. If [Clement] Greenberg’s formalism held that all signs point inward, namely, to the medium itself (i.e. that painting is essentially about painting and sculpture is about sculpture), Green affirms abstract painting’s capacity to evoke personal feelings from the unconscious."

Denise Green's 'Metonymy in Contemporary Art: a new paradigm'

(Denise Green is showing at Venice Biennale).

Definitely on my 'to read' list:

'Metonymy in Contemporary Art: a new paradigm'

In this book Denise Green develops an original approach to art criticism and modes of creativity which is inspired by aspects of Australian Aboriginal and Indian thought that are relevant to contemporary painting and current aesthetic sensibilities. The book interweaves her own evolution as an artist, a critique of Clement Greenberg and Walter Benjamin, and commentary on other artists.

Denise Green introduces the concept of metonymic thinking, as developed by the late poet and linguist, A. K. Ramanujan, one that is often different from what is present in Western art critical writing. In Ramanujan's formulation of metonymic thinking, the human and natural worlds are intrinsically related to one another as are the transcendent and mundane worlds. Metonymic thinking in contemporary art implies that one must take into account the inner world of the artist. When artists create metonymically there is a fusion between an inner state of mind and outer material world.

Denise Green had first discovered this mode of thinking in her own work and shows how it has been present in the evolution of her work. It is also applicable to the work of other contemporary artists, such as Agnes Martin, Joseph Beuys, and Brice Marden, among others. This different aesthetic and cognitive mode is often missing in the critical discourse on contemporary art. Denise Green's argument allows contemporary art to be interpreted from a broader, more global and pluralist perspective. (www.denisegreen.net/pages/writings01.html)

Image: Denise Green 2014, 'Appease'
watercolour and charcoal on paper
44.75 x 36.25 inches

Bobby Calves

The calf I've been making is in response to this:

"Most people aren't aware that in order to produce milk, dairy cows are kept almost continually pregnant. Unwanted male calves (known as 'bobby calves') are sent to slaughter in their first week of life so that their mothers' milk can be harvested for human consumption".

For more information on this practice see: http://www.animalsaustralia.org/issues/dairy.php

A particular Frame of Mind

As usual my sculptures emerge intuitively in a frame of mind I call 'conscious suspension'. I watch Youtubes and listen to podcasts related to my creative, theoretical 'thinking' and this keeps my CONSCIOUS, chatterbox mind elsewhere while I'm making. This process allows for my UNCONSCIOUS (also imagined as a collective 'field' of consciousness) to penetrate the work. It's only later after some reflection (and this can't be forced as it comes from 'left-of-field') that I start to recognise or understand the ideas, feelings and memories embedded in the work. Often these are unformed and felt as a psychological stirring, I don't immediately understand the symbolic language, recognising that perhaps more time needs to pass during which these stirrings get tossed around.

When I was making 'Bearable Whiteout' I was unaware of WHAT I was making and surprised in the finish. It was confronting at first, but to me there is a happiness, the baby is perhaps comforted by being penetrated by a polar bear!

I recall the experience of bringing a puppy home for the first time, the sensations of an uninhibited little being crawling all over me, and the feeling of not being able to 'get enough' of it. A sensation of wanting to envelop or merge with it. These are viscerally felt memories that affect me emotionally at a psychological level, which would be impossible to explicate within the limits of spoken or written language. I'm interested in how consciousness not limited by such mental constructs as language can be embedded in works of art during the act of making, especially if the art-maker has an emotional investment.

I'm yet to understand why she has a crown of three pig's ears!?

A moment of conception marked in time.

On Wednesday 13 May at 12.40pm another of my Strange Little Attractors emerged in what I've been calling a recognisable 'moment of conception'. It happens in a split second, in which a cold lump of clay is imbued with 'soul' and transformed into a 'thing' that I enter a relationship with, something I care for. In this case it was a new born calf. 

Witnessing a calf being born under my tree-house as a child growing up at Macedon in Victoria was another moment that was marked by an etching into memory. I recall being astonished ... lifted elsewhere by the event. It was as if time had been paused, the weather's breath withheld, and all tensions merged into one harmonious anticipation of the birth. And I liked to think that she came to my 'house' for a safe place to have her baby.

As always, I take note of synchronicity as a barometer of insight. The day after this 'birthing' of another sculpture, the moment I recognised it as a being that I could empathise with, my friend Heather visited sharing a similar 'marking of time' she'd read in Helen Garner's book 'This House of Grief', in which a journalist marks her knitting place with a red thread after realising it was where she had left off after being interrupted by a 'guilty' verdict in a murder case she had been following in court. "That night, at bedtime, I found the unfinished green wool scarf on the floor where I had dropped my bag. I picked it up and saw that, when the call for the verdict had come, I had stopped halfway along a row. I marked it with one red stitch. Then I knitted to the end of the row, and cast off".

Some moments just need anchoring in time and space.

Dinner with Jorge Luis Borges

I get a buzz finding thinkers that connect in some ways to my own theoretical thinking:

Today I came across 'The Borgesian Conundrum'. Jorge Luis Borges was a master of paradoxes, circularities and conundrums. I'll begin reading his short story titled, "The Library of Babel" (that contains ALL books). The story is set in a fictitious society in which all activities are controlled by the babel lottery (I'm calling this adopting synchronicity out of necessity because life is so complex and in information overload that there is no time to read everything); there is a man who forgets nothing (I'm calling him 'the field' of consciousness that holds all knowledge, a bit library-like himself); and two oppositional theologians, one of which sends the other to the stake then realises ... ooops .... they're one and the same person (I'm calling them Subject and Object, who if they'd empathised or 'merged' with one another, would have found harmony and nothing to argue about ... well, at least not enough to lead to such a brutal outcome).

Jorge Luis and I are meeting tonight over a trans-culinary cassoulet of my own invention, using a 'speck' base with Moroccan spices, French lentils, chic peas, green peas, and Kyogle asparagus on basmati rice.

http://www.latinflavours.com.au/what-to-eat-when-reading-borges/

I'm reading 'Quiet' by Susan Cain

This book is awesome, it's changing how I think and feel about myself. I was so surprised to have been 'tested' as an...
Posted by Susie Marcroft art, philosophy and science on Monday, May 11, 2015

Some ideas stay 'true'.

Here's an oldie but a goodie – from the Transit graduating exhibition. It's interesting for me, how SOME IDEAS over time don't change.

http://discover.scu.edu.au/…/artistic-journey-to-culminate…/

Puppy Love Series

Butterflies in the stomach, emotion, raw nervous energy, tension, vulnerability, self doubt

Posted by Susie Marcroft art, philosophy and science on Sunday, May 10, 2015

'Bill's trip north landed him in heaven'

This is a work based on 'Bill' the Live Export 'ambassador'.

Posted by Susie Marcroft art, philosophy and science on Thursday, May 7, 2015

Love at first sight

I met this gorgeous boy on the main street in Kyogle. It was love at first sight with an exchange that stayed with me for three glorious days. What is it about animals!?

Posted by Susie Marcroft art, philosophy and science on Sunday, May 10, 2015

'Author' and an antechinus

What of our human 'nature'? Some have proclaimed us to be half angel, half animal. Are we becoming more or less 'animal'...
Posted by Susie Marcroft art, philosophy and science on Sunday, May 10, 2015

Alex, a parrot with human-like cognition

"You be good. I love you". – the last words spoken by Alex (a parrot) before he died. Read on ...http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/

Posted by Susie Marcroft art, philosophy and science on Sunday, May 10, 2015

'Two of a kind: brother and sister act'

Posted by Susie Marcroft art, philosophy and science on Sunday, May 10, 2015