ARTISTS TALKING

# 21 [2 March 2010]

Returning to Melbourne via a snowy but Spring-like New York. Just a couple of days, and will see the Whitney Biennial tomorrow. Some interesting shows today -- the Guggenheim (Anish Kapoor, Tino Sehgal), Marian Goodman (Steve McQueen) and others. And particularly interestingly Printed Matter in Chelsea, perhaps the largest not-for-profit organisation devoted to artists' books.

# 20 [27 February 2010]

# 19 [27 February 2010]

# 18 [27 February 2010]

I am now in Halifax, I gave the talk, which was a very rewarding experience, and the installation at the Anna Leonowens Gallery is up and I am pleased with it. Even better, it has extended my creative process, as exhibiting should but does not always manage. So, food for creative thought.

I have stayed in three different settings here including the NSCAD artist’s apartment in downtown Halifax near the harbour, Barbara (Lounder) and Bob (Bean)’s place in Dartmouth across the harbour, and finally with Cathy (Busby) and Garry (Kennedy) here in the North End. I have felt so welcomed, people have been most generous and supportive.

And the main birds observed  - as expected crows, seagulls and pigeons. The pigeons are of course Columba livia, the seagulls are Atlantic gulls – Larus argentatus – plus others I am not so sure of – and the crows are the American crow – Corvus brachyrhynchos – a new species for me. The crows are numerous and noisy. They have a rolling ‘r’ to their call, similar to Corvus corone in the UK, and the call is a higher pitch. Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) are numerous here too and sing outside Cathy and Garry’s – a huge variety of tuneful trills and whistles, a real chorus.

After my talk last Monday, a student, Carolann (Broome), told me about a crow phenomenon up near Mount Saint Mary’s University here in Halifax, where thousands (literally) of crows gather between October and April. Professor Fred Harrington met Cathy and I up there for a tour the other evening, and what an extraordinary phenomenon. I have never seen so many crows in one place – certainly safety in numbers. We are returning tonight to get an extended audio recording.

# 17 [26 January 2010]

Bird Diary

Coburg Front Room 7.45am Sun 24th

'Weh, weh; woh woh woh'

Then again

'Weh, weh; woh woh woh'

A crow (Corvus mellori) calls loudly. Ambient doves; odd wattlebird; odd car.

Then, faint carolling of magpies down along the Merri. Doves calling to each other, a wattlebird again. All faint, no main players (or singers rather) since the crow.

More than 25 mins later:

Butcherbird whistles it's lovely tune nearby-

1 2 3 4
123
123
1 2 3 4

123 rise in pitch sequentially and 4 drops.

Plus a dove with it's slightly gurgling 'coo' ('cuckoo-crroooo-cuck' in Simpson and Day). It seems like a great effort to make this sound, not the relaxed purr of the common pigeons' 'oom'-ing (Columba livia). Almost breathy.

'Our - ourrr'
'Our - our - ourrr'
'Our - our - ourr'

Repeated two or three notes. Higher in pitch than common pigeon. One or two short notes followed by a longer note that drops slightly in pitch.

The sounds of the butcherbird and magpie carolling whistles combine in the street somewhere - not an exchange but an unintentional duet (I think).

Singers:

Little Raven (Corvus mellori)

Spotted Turtle Dove (Streptopelia chinensis)

Red Wattlebird (Anthochaera carunculata)

Australian Magpie (Gymnorhina tibicen)

Grey Butcherbird (Cracticus torquatus)

A useful link for some examples of these birds is:

http://birdsinbackyards.net/

# 16 [26 January 2010]

Bird Diary

Hong Kong Airport Gate 60 8.15am a few days ago

Two unidentified birds land briefly on the supprts of the enclosed walkway between gate and plane. Caught them as smudges on camera as they flew off.

# 15 [9 January 2010]

# 14 [7 January 2010]

Some timely visits to retrospectives of John Baldessari (Tate Modern) and Ed Ruscha (Hayward) both West coast Americans of a similar era, both hovering on the boundaries of conceptual art and minimalism, with reference to Dada. The wit in the work is infectious.

Ed Ruscha ‘words as landscape’.

On TV last night ‘Horizon: The secret life of dogs’ and their underrated intelligence by us humans (not unusual). Also Natural World on New Guinea's incredible birds of paradise.

Which reminded me of Michel de Montaigne (1500s) quoted in Jacques Derrida’s ‘The Animal that therefore I am’ (1997):

‘How does he [the human being] know, by the force of his intelligence, the secret internal stirrings of animals? By what comparison between them and us does he infer the stupidity that he attributes to them?’

Montaigne ‘attributes much to the animal, beginning with a type of language…and [he] recognises in the animal … a capacity to respond’ (Derrida):

‘it is not credible that Nature has denied us this resource that she has given to many other animals; for what is it but speech, this faculty we see in them of complaining, rejoicing, calling to each other for help, inviting each other to love, as they do by the use of their voice? How could they not speak to one another? They certainly speak to us, and we to them. In how many ways do we not speak to our dogs? And they answer us. We talk to them in another language, with other names, than to birds, hogs, oxen, horses; and we change the idiom according to the species’ (Michel de Montaigne ‘Apology for Raymond Sebond’)

# 13 [24 December 2009]

"How many people turn on the radio and leave the room, satisfied with this distant and sufficient noise? Is this absurd? Not in the least. What is essential is not that one particular person speak and another hear, but that, with no one in particular speaking and no one in particular listening, there should nonetheless be speech, and a kind of undefined promise to communicate, guaranteed by the incessant coming and going of solitary words"

Maurice Blanchot Everyday Speech 1962

# 12 [24 December 2009]

"What happens when nothing happens?"

Stephen Johnstone Intro to Recent Art and the Everyday in The Everyday: Documents of Contemporary Art 2008

"The banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? (...) How are we to speak of these common things, how to track them down, how to flush them out, wrest them from the dross in which they are mired, how to give them meaning, a tongue, to let them, finally, speak of what it is, who we are".

George Perec, Species of Spaces, 1974