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Arts

The Rijksmuseum used to be the dullest of the major European collections. It looked as though Ursula Hoff had painted all the pictures. An air of dowdiness hung over the massive building and crowded collections where the good and the great indiscriminately mixed in with the mediocre in warren-like galleries with an over-supply of the decorative arts.

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Art as Therapy by Alain de Botton and John Armstrong

by
February 2014, no. 358

Art, in all its diverse manifestations, from storytelling to picture-making, from singing and dancing to poetry, is as distinctive and universal an activity of the human mind as language. It is, in essence, a way of thinking about the world, of shaping experience as it is felt to be and reshaping it as it could be, that long predates the development of rational reflection. Stories have been told for thousands of years, perhaps tens of thousands; philosophical and scientific thought begins, for practical purposes, around 2500 years ago.

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Reading Andrew Montana’s new biography of Loudon Sainthill leaves one imagining how much the artist would have achieved without his lover, amanuensis, and entrepreneur, Harry Tatlock Miller. Lovers for some thirty-four years, they seem destined to achieve remarkable things together. Well into his project Montana realised that he could not tell Sainthill’s story without Miller’s, and so Fantasy Modern became a dual biography, a ‘portrait of a marriage’ of two gay men and of the work that bound them. It is also an encyclopedic trip through rapid aesthetic change, a social-family history of rare individuals, and urban culture shaped by art and design, not just coffee, magazines, and booze.

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With aching feet, bursting bladders, and the odd carrot for sustenance, Samuel Beckett’s famous pair of tramps have shuffled on to the stage of the Sydney Theatre for an extended run, though run is hardly the apposite word for this stationary duo. Perhaps one could call it an extended slump.

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When the intellectuals, writers, and artists of the Renaissance sought a theoretical basis for the new styles they were developing – at a time when the new meant all’antica and the term modern was still coloured by associations with the Middle Ages – they found that ancient sources were relatively abundant in some areas and scarce or non-existent in others. Poets could find inspiration in Horace’s Ars Poetica, and later in Aristotle’s Poetics. And there was a wealth of material on rhetoric – Aristotle, Cicero, Quintilian, Tacitus – in fact an abundance out of all proportion to the practice of the art in an age when public speaking was represented by sermons and university lectures rather than by the deliberative and forensic oratory that were the lifeblood of Greece and Rome.

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Living in a Modern Way:California Design 1930–1965 is the catalogue accompanying an exhibition of the same name at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011–12. The exhibition is now showing at Queensland’s Gallery of Modern Art, after a stint in Seoul.

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As film critics go, Geoffrey O’Brien is a lover, not a fighter: unconcerned with starting quarrels or settling scores, he simply aims to share his pleasure in what he has seen. Perhaps his remarkably good temper stems from the fact that he is not a full-time critic, but an example of that nearly extinct species, the all-round man of letters. He is editor-in-chief of the Library Of America series, and oversaw the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations; he has published six collections of poetry, along with books on pop music, hard-boiled fiction, and the history of Times Square.

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Reflections upon Melbourne’s reputation as a world cultural capital often sideline film-making, but the relationship is long and fruitful. The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), filmed on the former Charterisville Estate in Heidelberg, is history’s first feature film. The first Australian entry in this series of global guides highlights the centrality of location to emotional spaces and film narrative. Melbourne-set films are defined by a ‘dispersed and piecemeal psycho-geography of the city’. The guide loosely groups forty-six films into six eras, providing snapshots of pivotal locations and scene-setting stills, from the dusty dystopian carnage of Mad Max (1979) to the subterranean blues of the brutal Romper Stomper (1992) opening sequence.

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Stranger by the Lake is set entirely within the perimeters of a cruising ground for men by the shores of a lake in France. There unfolds a perfectly simple temporal conceit in which the cruiser, a handsome thirty-something everyman called Franck (Pierre Deladonchamps), arrives each summer day, parks his car, and walks down to the pebbled beach by the lake’s edge. That this is a narrative of repetitions becomes clear the third or fourth time we see the sunny establishing shot of the makeshift carpark where Franck parks his Renault. His routine documents almost ethnographically what happens at the cruising ground: he walks down to the beach, greets some acquaintances, takes off his clothes, swims, sunbakes, waits, rummages around in the scrub for sex, then does it all again.

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Ninety years after ‘An Exhibition of Australian Art’ was held at Burlington House, London, home of the Royal Academy of Arts, the exhibition Australia opened on 21 September 2013. Touted as the biggest exhibition of Australian art to be staged in the United Kingdom, it is an ambitious undertaking – nothing less than a survey exhibition encapsulati ...