bloc-heads and old volks

i hadn't realised this (until relatively recently*) but the whole idea of "eastern europe" is a fiction of the 20th century.
eastern europe is synonymous with communist europe and the "eastern bloc countries"

Central Europe, circa time of Copernicus

*it was milan kundera who introduced me to this situation.  it's his contention that the countries described as "eastern europe" - his own czech[republic]-o-slovakia, hungary, east germany, poland, romania ... were until then known as central europe "mitteleurope".  The "east" was orthodox - russia, the ukraine - with a very different sensibility.
here's an excerpt of kundera talking to philip roth on the subject
MK: As a concept of cultural history, Eastern Europe is Russia, with its quite specific history anchored in the Byzantine world. Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, just like Austria have never been part of Eastern Europe. From the very beginning they have taken part in the great adventure of Western civilization, with its Gothic, its Renaissance, its Reformation--a movement which has its cradle precisely in this region.  It was here, in Central Europe, that modern culture found its greatest impulses; psychoanalysis, structuralism, dodecaphony, Bartok's music, Kafka's and Musil's new aesthetics of the novel.  The postwar annexation of Central Europe (or at least its major part) by Russian civilization caused Western culture to lose its vital center of gravity.  It is the most significant event in the history of the West in our century, and we cannot dismiss the possibility that the end of Central Europe marked the beginning of the end for Europe as a whole.

anyway, my parents grew up in "communist" poland, and the eastern bloc has a resonance for me even though i've lived all my life in that curious "western" anomaly (geographically in the "far east"), australia.
i'm not sure if it's this heritage, or more a fondness for 70s aesthetic but i like the look of this rally car...

source
it looks like a skoda to me, although the badge is wrong so perhaps it's not (part of it in fact looks like my old 1977 saab 99). aha, it turns out, it's a wartburg, an east german car


this one is definitely a škoda

source

since the berlin wall came down, not only the old eastern bloc has chucked its shackles - eastern bloc cars have been reborn too.  škoda is now quasi-german, a czech volkswagon - it has borrowed its adopted german parent's mechanical credentials



















and i want one ...!

back to gritty romantic 70s history


rally cars ...

old school wiki-leaks

source - ffffound

not really "sean kelly"

one of my search strategies is to search images on google rather than get text results
this works well when looking for bags or skirts or restaurants (it's how i picked the beer garden for a recent birthday lunch)
trying to remember the grafitti in carlton in the 80s-early 90s, huge SEAN KELLY on a picket fence, i ran an image search, "sean kelly" graffiti ...
i didn't find the graffiti but i did find some interesting images ... when i followed up the ones i liked, they weren't disparate images at all,
most were from art blog - fire place chats

Damien Hirst (Bristol England, UK b.1965) Tixylix, 1998.
Household gloss and wax crayon on canvas, 59 7/8 x 59 7/8 in.

(Gary Nader Art Centre)

Erwin Wurm: Beauty Business
December 1, 2011 – March 4, 2012

Will Ryman’s 65rh Street Rose sculpture will be on display at the Sagamore Hotel in Miami Beach during Art Basel Miami Beach 2011

from somewhere else,

Chateau de Bouillon floodlit (friends reunited).

 death of a deli

other not really "sean kelly" results...

royal hotel carlton, bologna

one of many graffiti images

from melbourne art critic blog

Sisterhood, North Carlton, 1974

Apparently, the graffiti on this Carlton North building is an "eye-sore"

something new

pink & yellow are among my favourite combinations... pink & orange are good too







art of emily barletta

reading the signs

spring has sprung

walking in to work this morning, i went passed the peter maccallum cancer centre / hospital
there's a garden across the street from it, at the back of treasury - just a little triangle verge
under a tree i saw daffodils in full bloom

at first i thought they'd been planted (they weren't there last week, so they hadn't grown there from bulbs)

getting closer i realised they had been planted, but only after being crocheted first.  cute.

i'd much prefer to buy a crocheted daffodil than those awful trashy pins and pens they usually sell to raise funds.
they could enlist school-kiddies to finger-knit little bows to tie to fingers (to remind us of those we've lost to cancer, those who are still living through cancer, and that we can beat it if we support cancer research)

matisse down under

i was at the nla in canberra last weekend,
and saw this rather lovely brett whiteley,

Brett WHITELEY

Interior with time past 1976
Painting, oil, charcoal and ink on canvas
182.0 h x 200.0 w cm 
Purchased 1978

hmm, very matisse i thought (no prizes for that)
according to the nla website,
Interior with time past is a bold, vibrant expression of Whiteley’s life. Against a lush orange background, he conjured up his studio at Lavender Bay, with its vast expansive view across Sydney Harbour. Into this space he scattered images of his own paintings and sculptures, and in the foreground he placed a still life with cherries, avocados and a vase of flowers. From the copulating couple in the drawing on the easel to the sparkling harbour view, to the cigarettes and smoke, he evoked his own seductive, sensuous life. He conveyed a taste of high summer, luxurious Sydney, the Pacific eden.

The Red Studio

Henri Matisse (French, 1869–1954)
Issy-les-Moulineaux, fall 1911. Oil on canvas, 71 1/4" x 7' 2 1/4" (181 x 219.1 cm). Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund. © 2012 

From the MoMA site,
"Where I got the color red—to be sure, I just don't know," Matisse once remarked. "I find that all these things . . . only become what they are to me when I see them together with the color red." This painting features a small retrospective of Matisse's recent painting, sculpture, and ceramics, displayed in his studio. The artworks appear in color and in detail, while the room's architecture and furnishings are indicated only by negative gaps in the red surface. The composition's central axis is a grandfather clock without hands—it is as if, in the oasis of the artist's studio, time were suspended.

in situ at MoMA,

also from MoMA,

The Museum of Modern Art , MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 77

"Modern art," said Matisse, "spreads joy around it by its color, which calms us." In this radiant painting he saturates a room—his own studio—with red. Art and decorative objects are painted solidly, but furniture and architecture are linear diagrams, silhouetted by "gaps" in the red surface. These gaps reveal earlier layers of yellow and blue paint beneath the red; Matisse changed the colors until they felt right to him. (The studio was actually white.)

The studio is an important place for any artist, and this one Matisse had built for himself, encouraged by new patronage in 1909. He shows in it a carefully arranged exhibition of his own works. Angled lines suggest depth, and the blue-green light of the window intensifies the sense of interior space, but the expanse of red flattens the image. Matisse heightens this effect by, for example, omitting the vertical line of the corner of the room.

The entire composition is clustered around the enigmatic axis of the grandfather clock, a flat rectangle whose face has no hands. Time is suspended in this magical space. On the foreground table, an open box of crayons, perhaps a symbolic stand-in for the artist, invites us into the room. But the studio itself, defined by ethereal lines and subtle spatial discontinuities, remains Matisse's private universe.