dreams of integrity
About Me
- M. F. McAuliffe
- Portland, Oregon, United States
- Co-founder, co-editor of Gobshite Quarterly and Reprobate/GobQ Books
Friday, May 1, 2020
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Strange Attractors
It seems to be out of print, Alan Garner's Red Shift. Which is a shame. Its Roman Britain sections catch the utter weirdness of imperial collapse. Its glimpses into the idolization of any local egregiousness afterwards are creepy and horrifying: Delinquent & murderous nutjobs become the strange attractors of chaos. Like Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, whose internalized imperial order has collapsed, they are creepy, horrifying, and terrifying.
Collapse empowers them, so strange or insane they’d never be heard from otherwise, attractive because they offer certainty in completely uncertain times.
Caveat emptor.
Collapse empowers them, so strange or insane they’d never be heard from otherwise, attractive because they offer certainty in completely uncertain times.
Caveat emptor.
Sunday, April 12, 2020
Friday, April 10, 2020
Monday, March 2, 2020
"Publishing from the Provinces”
The most obvious meaning of the title of Ivor Indyk's essay is that Australian publishing is “from the provinces” of the world's geography as well as from the southern extremities of the old British Empire. Though Indyk immediately says this is not what he means, it is still something I’d like to examine for a moment. The provinces of Australian writing lie at the bottom of two stacked English language gravity wells, not just one.
The two great centres of English language publishing are London and New York. The geographic outer provinces of publishing are everywhere, even in London and New York. The question of provincialism goes on and on; it all depends on who has the talking stick and where the azimuth is. (Hence the irregular Gobshite Quarterly essays or rants under the general title “Every Edge A Centre.”)
Non-empires have small (i.e., unimportant, unbroadcast) literatures. If a work is found to be astonishing, e.g. Norwegian Knausgard's six volumes of autobiography, the work is translated, its author praised, raised and highly paid. Norwegian writing is not.
Norway is not a current or recent world power: there are no colonies or former colonies where Norwegian is a mandatory subject at every school, Norwegian books are on every syllabus, and Norwegian is the lingua franca of business, government, social mobility and ambitious writing.
The literary/artistic worth of things written, painted, played, drawn, built or projected is often inseparable from the current economic power and associated standing of the culture producing it, its possession of cultural colonies.
This point was elided when post-colonial literature in English was called “Commonwealth Literature,” complete with intellectual sniff. There was no real azimuth outside London. “Literature” stood alone and above the working class, slanting the clattering factories, the conditions of women, gunboat diplomacy, slavery, trading triangles and the bloody reality of imposed paradigms. The Church of the Book stood beside the Church of England, a two-person trinity as immanent, eternal and unchangeable, regarded and disregarded as the original.
The concerns of the books we studied were held to be universal or universally applicable when they were often, also, if not only, the concerns of a (foreign) ruling caste.
In my own literal province, “American Literature” only appeared as a studyable subject during the Vietnam War. (Britain left the Common Market in 1964. Time to study our new paradigm, our new friends, defenders, masters...)
(Perhaps I was the only one befuddled. Perhaps I resisted understanding that all these magic nets of language were also foreign and self-interested flim-flam. My parents’ and culture’s quarrel with “education” was based on the long experience of a working class and religious minority of the political nature of education. Perhaps I resisted their understanding because I resisted their insistence that that was all there was to it. I was already outside the family and the group. I was a teenager, a foundling, mix-up at the hospital, a writer to my fingertips and spine.)
But Indyk is actually anxious to discuss a certain kind of writing, what he calls "the outer provinces" of imaginative writing in English in Australia.
He describes and discusses five titles: the novels Blindness and Rage, by Brian Castro, Border Districts, by Gerald Murnane, and The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, and the poetry collections Empirical, by Lisa Gorton, and Heide, by Pi.O. All these are recent titles published by Giramondo Publishing, of which Indyk was the founding editor and publisher.
Of Castro he says:
Indyk says, “Each book carries a unique significance and value, both because of the effort that has gone into its crafting and the contribution that its writing makes to language and the imagination.”
There’s a marvellous passage somewhere in Pilgrim At Tinker’s Creek where Dillard describes, vividly, how our stupendously over-productive world runs on wasted effort: uncounted trillions of unnecessary sperm, rivers of unfertilized fish-eggs...
The built-in prodigality of natural processes means that some writers will produce some books which don't find readers. Effort alone does not create significance or value. Significance and value are communal judgements. They can't exist in isolation; they can't come into being because one individual announces them. There's nothing as isolated as an unread book. A book's contribution to its community or culture is also a communal judgement and decision.
On the other hand, not belittling the kind of book and writer Indyk is describing is a matter of common decency and respect. Respect is a matter I’ll return to in a moment.
If we ask, How can a largely unread book contribute to language and the imagination? answers can begin to emerge.
If books like these were taught they would start to become known, their methods shown to have value, as saying something the community or culture can learn, as seeing something that had not been seen before, saying something the community or culture might find beautiful or witty or amazing. Under those conditions books like these could begin to make a contribution to the community's language and imagination. Books like these have to be aggressively championed into communal awareness before they can become part of a culture's conversation.
Failing that, being admired and discussed by, and influencing, other writers is the only way this kind of writing can make a contribution to culture. Books selling 50 copies or so (which is the figure Indyk quotes for Brian Castro's title — in any case, books selling fewer than a thousand copies in Australia) will not be able to contribute to "language and the imagination" unless a significant number of those copies are bought or read by productive and more widely circulating writers who use or praise the original work. The chance that posterity will resurrect and re-evaluate an unknown or forgotten work is so small the notion should be classed as a delusion.
The kinds of writers Indyk is speaking of used to be called writers' writers. The phrase implicitly admits the work doesn't have a wide readership. But it also includes respect for the work and the writer's skill. Sometimes it also means the work has been mined more than once for useful tropes or techniques, making/keeping the writer's reputation alive at least in the writing community.
In general, baroque or rococo recursiveness in writing is the taste of a small percentage of readers. It’s a literary game you do or don't enjoy, a taste you may or may not have. Once these books become more widely known and perhaps taught, discussed, acknowledged, I suspect their popularity would still be on a par with a week of Difficult Listening.
But respect and influence and popularity and money aren’t the same things. Only a thoroughly mercantile culture would insist they are.
Working in or from the outer provinces is hard on artists generally, not just writers. You hear of one, a completely neglected genius of a painter, fifty years ahead of his time, who spends the last twenty years of his life in illness and alcohol, when in New York he’d’ve been rated as highly as De Kooning. You hear of another, who's left the schmoozing art world altogether, makes watercolour sculptures, pencil drawings, and laser print collages, hundreds of works in his basement no one has ever seen. You hear of a third, whose experimental fiction doesn't sell, who destroys his marriage and reputation because he can find no publisher for anything beyond a book review.
In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, my question is: But how much should the "losers" lose?
Mercantile culture most often speaks of writing/art in terms of prizes, print runs and sales. The real question is respect, of which money has become the general index.
How can Australian culture respect its artists? (A subset of respecting everybody.)
This is a genuine question. The farthest province of physical and imaginative Australian cultural production also contains the opposite of being ignored into artistic nonexistence. That opposite is being worked to death, out of sight, into functional nonexistence because your work is in such demand.
The farthest province is a shed in the outback. It contains the forced labour of elderly Aboriginal painters.
And so in my Moebius strip of a question, the other side, the same side, is this: In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, who are the winners?
And how, and how much, and what, should the "winners" win?
The two great centres of English language publishing are London and New York. The geographic outer provinces of publishing are everywhere, even in London and New York. The question of provincialism goes on and on; it all depends on who has the talking stick and where the azimuth is. (Hence the irregular Gobshite Quarterly essays or rants under the general title “Every Edge A Centre.”)
Non-empires have small (i.e., unimportant, unbroadcast) literatures. If a work is found to be astonishing, e.g. Norwegian Knausgard's six volumes of autobiography, the work is translated, its author praised, raised and highly paid. Norwegian writing is not.
Norway is not a current or recent world power: there are no colonies or former colonies where Norwegian is a mandatory subject at every school, Norwegian books are on every syllabus, and Norwegian is the lingua franca of business, government, social mobility and ambitious writing.
The literary/artistic worth of things written, painted, played, drawn, built or projected is often inseparable from the current economic power and associated standing of the culture producing it, its possession of cultural colonies.
This point was elided when post-colonial literature in English was called “Commonwealth Literature,” complete with intellectual sniff. There was no real azimuth outside London. “Literature” stood alone and above the working class, slanting the clattering factories, the conditions of women, gunboat diplomacy, slavery, trading triangles and the bloody reality of imposed paradigms. The Church of the Book stood beside the Church of England, a two-person trinity as immanent, eternal and unchangeable, regarded and disregarded as the original.
The concerns of the books we studied were held to be universal or universally applicable when they were often, also, if not only, the concerns of a (foreign) ruling caste.
In my own literal province, “American Literature” only appeared as a studyable subject during the Vietnam War. (Britain left the Common Market in 1964. Time to study our new paradigm, our new friends, defenders, masters...)
(Perhaps I was the only one befuddled. Perhaps I resisted understanding that all these magic nets of language were also foreign and self-interested flim-flam. My parents’ and culture’s quarrel with “education” was based on the long experience of a working class and religious minority of the political nature of education. Perhaps I resisted their understanding because I resisted their insistence that that was all there was to it. I was already outside the family and the group. I was a teenager, a foundling, mix-up at the hospital, a writer to my fingertips and spine.)
But Indyk is actually anxious to discuss a certain kind of writing, what he calls "the outer provinces" of imaginative writing in English in Australia.
He describes and discusses five titles: the novels Blindness and Rage, by Brian Castro, Border Districts, by Gerald Murnane, and The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, and the poetry collections Empirical, by Lisa Gorton, and Heide, by Pi.O. All these are recent titles published by Giramondo Publishing, of which Indyk was the founding editor and publisher.
Of Castro he says:
… [T]his play of mirrors, of repetitions and inversions … is characteristic of the imagination at full stretch, in the province of literature I am describing…. In this far province the imagination rules, in its own unruly fashion.Of Murnane he says:
It is as if he is out to demonstrate, that the imagination which produced … worlds within worlds is still active, still revelling in its own inventiveness.Of Wright he says:
Wright’s most recent novel The Swan Book begins with just the kind of recursion I have been examining … that movement in which the imagination seeks to expand beyond the condition of neglect or indifference, or in the Indigenous case negation, to declare its power.Of Gorton and Pi O he says:
Both titles make use of citation and montage, and draw on an encyclopaedic range of sources, and both mobilise expansive perspectives through these means.And of this type of work in general he says:
The sense of being unregarded, and therefore unconstrained (the element of play), the recursive inventions of an imagination which seeks to move beyond its frontiers, the encyclopaedic aspiration which seeks to discover the whole world in a remote part of it – all these suggest a willingness to experiment with perspectives, in both space and time, both formally and in terms of the responsibilities perspective entails.From the type of work these writers create Indyk moves on to describe the writer's hope and puzzlement at the general response to it:
To reside in the literary world, in the outer provinces of publishing, is to become used to the discrepancy between expectation and response. Each book carries a unique significance and value, both because of the effort that has gone into its crafting, and because of the contribution that its writing makes to language and the imagination. I suppose no public response could ever do justice to this sense of value… What to make of this craziness, the absence of readers?I understand Indyk's sympathy for writers whose books are lost in the marketplace because they do not do what more commercially successful books are doing. I admire him for going to bat for the writers he publishes. At the same time I think there are other contours to the situation.
Indyk says, “Each book carries a unique significance and value, both because of the effort that has gone into its crafting and the contribution that its writing makes to language and the imagination.”
There’s a marvellous passage somewhere in Pilgrim At Tinker’s Creek where Dillard describes, vividly, how our stupendously over-productive world runs on wasted effort: uncounted trillions of unnecessary sperm, rivers of unfertilized fish-eggs...
The built-in prodigality of natural processes means that some writers will produce some books which don't find readers. Effort alone does not create significance or value. Significance and value are communal judgements. They can't exist in isolation; they can't come into being because one individual announces them. There's nothing as isolated as an unread book. A book's contribution to its community or culture is also a communal judgement and decision.
On the other hand, not belittling the kind of book and writer Indyk is describing is a matter of common decency and respect. Respect is a matter I’ll return to in a moment.
If we ask, How can a largely unread book contribute to language and the imagination? answers can begin to emerge.
If books like these were taught they would start to become known, their methods shown to have value, as saying something the community or culture can learn, as seeing something that had not been seen before, saying something the community or culture might find beautiful or witty or amazing. Under those conditions books like these could begin to make a contribution to the community's language and imagination. Books like these have to be aggressively championed into communal awareness before they can become part of a culture's conversation.
Failing that, being admired and discussed by, and influencing, other writers is the only way this kind of writing can make a contribution to culture. Books selling 50 copies or so (which is the figure Indyk quotes for Brian Castro's title — in any case, books selling fewer than a thousand copies in Australia) will not be able to contribute to "language and the imagination" unless a significant number of those copies are bought or read by productive and more widely circulating writers who use or praise the original work. The chance that posterity will resurrect and re-evaluate an unknown or forgotten work is so small the notion should be classed as a delusion.
The kinds of writers Indyk is speaking of used to be called writers' writers. The phrase implicitly admits the work doesn't have a wide readership. But it also includes respect for the work and the writer's skill. Sometimes it also means the work has been mined more than once for useful tropes or techniques, making/keeping the writer's reputation alive at least in the writing community.
In general, baroque or rococo recursiveness in writing is the taste of a small percentage of readers. It’s a literary game you do or don't enjoy, a taste you may or may not have. Once these books become more widely known and perhaps taught, discussed, acknowledged, I suspect their popularity would still be on a par with a week of Difficult Listening.
But respect and influence and popularity and money aren’t the same things. Only a thoroughly mercantile culture would insist they are.
Working in or from the outer provinces is hard on artists generally, not just writers. You hear of one, a completely neglected genius of a painter, fifty years ahead of his time, who spends the last twenty years of his life in illness and alcohol, when in New York he’d’ve been rated as highly as De Kooning. You hear of another, who's left the schmoozing art world altogether, makes watercolour sculptures, pencil drawings, and laser print collages, hundreds of works in his basement no one has ever seen. You hear of a third, whose experimental fiction doesn't sell, who destroys his marriage and reputation because he can find no publisher for anything beyond a book review.
In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, my question is: But how much should the "losers" lose?
Mercantile culture most often speaks of writing/art in terms of prizes, print runs and sales. The real question is respect, of which money has become the general index.
How can Australian culture respect its artists? (A subset of respecting everybody.)
This is a genuine question. The farthest province of physical and imaginative Australian cultural production also contains the opposite of being ignored into artistic nonexistence. That opposite is being worked to death, out of sight, into functional nonexistence because your work is in such demand.
The farthest province is a shed in the outback. It contains the forced labour of elderly Aboriginal painters.
And so in my Moebius strip of a question, the other side, the same side, is this: In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, who are the winners?
And how, and how much, and what, should the "winners" win?
Wednesday, September 25, 2019
Not Watching The News
I can't watch the news. Oh, I can see most of it, headlines on the net & any article I think I can stand to read. But the talk-show analysis I have not been able to stand, not since the day after Robert Mueller’s Congressional testimony — the ghoulish, triumphant ways the press, even the non-trumpian parts of it, characterized what they saw as his failures. Which were, of course, their own. I pitied his obvious, unexpected, frailty.
And so I have watched other things.
Among the latest other things has been a large part of the Prime Suspect series, the ones I remember less well, the later ones. Which I remember less well because they are less good, seasons 4-7. They are less granular, less cross-textured; the thinness of the plot line leaves spots where Mirren has to carry the whole show forward with refusal – silence, wordless ambiguity or submissions, head tilting, angle of neck, eyes lowered, eyes turned away. She has a repertoire of these pauses, but they are not enough.
I decided against Season 5 because I couldn't take the savage dog scenes again – the empty swimming pool, the murder. We're in an age of naked savagery: police shootings the new lynching, the new de facto Jim Crow, the government, this hyena regime, attacking women, children, migrants, the homeless, animals, trees, wildlife reserves, anything and everything that is not a particular section of itself.
So I decided on seasons 3, 4, 6, & 7. 3, because it was so intense, because it so deeply concerned police corruption. I'd forgotten David Thewliss and Ciaran Hinds and was glad to see them again, and to find that Vern/Vera is Peter Capaldi. That season also originated the trope of the soprano children's choir, the mystère des voix Bulgares-type threnody for the innocent.
Knowing how it all ends, though I've forgotten the details of the journey, I'm watching these seasons for Helen Mirren, for the sake of watching a very good artist at work. An artist working; somebody, something working. And Prime Suspect is the longest single arc of Helen Mirren's work that we have.
After season 3 there are no women writers. Meredith Oakes has story credit for the first of the three 1995 movie-length episodes of what is not called Prime Suspect 4. The rest are written by men,
The final season is a study in cruelty – Tennison as old & unfuckable, childless, butch-ish, on the verge of dotage; burnt out, alcoholic, quasi-incompetent; alienated, orphaned, futureless. Her face is flat-lit and pale, her blonde hair fading and wispy, her grey skirt the colour of the office curtains and chairs and carpet and corridors. There's nothing left but the occasional white flash of anger in the depths of her blue, blue eyes.
At the end she's slumped on the floor of the interrogation room, next to the just-confessed murderer, a 14 year old girl. The OIC and others enter, having watched the interrogation from behind one-way glass. Mirren says, looking down, "You've got what you wanted," and it seems that one of the meanings of that line is: the complete humiliation and defeat of Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison who, through her own fault, her own impossible refusals and demands, is now so alone and lonely a murderous child sucked her in.
Somehow I do not think that is quite what Lynda La Plante would have done to or with that character.
Yes, the final scene of the episode is of Jane Tennison giving her horrible retirement party the slip (with male stripper in police costume), striding along the footpath into a probably alcohol-free unknown. She is gathered and determined; she refuses to take any part in the kind of party she specifically asked not to have, which features and celebrates the bullying, blokey police culture she was never prepared to join nor able to defeat.
Forsaken, almost human, she sank not beneath their wisdom.
I can see how the concept plays on the page, but that's not the effect of watching The Final Act. One striding-away scene after 3 hours of alcoholic failure as a cop, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, to mother or be a mother, a girlfriend or wife – after three hours of that kind of lighting, the effect is to leave you feeling there is nothing left, that there was never any point to any of it. The bullying, blokey culture would have pinned the tail on the wrong donkey or on none at all; the victims are still dead, their families are still bereft, and there's nothing to say thank you for, or to. Justice is a long way away.
In 2006, the nadir of Bush 2, when Final Act was made, the only hopeful scene on screen was the destruction of the Houses of Parliament in V for Vendetta.
In 2019, watching the sterilization of Tennison's gesture towards legacy, her gift of art to the young girl artist – that is, watching the destruction of the autonomous feminine of two generations, and seeing the hard light and concrete of what's shown to remain – leaves me wretched.
And then suddenly that extraordinary shot flashes into my mind: the shot at the end of the scene in the café where, following the steps of AA, Bill Otley apologizes to Tennison for trying to ruin her career. The last sequence in the café scene shows Tennison walking away. Then the camera goes back to Otley. He looks upward, to his left, mouth hanging open as though gasping for air; the lighting illuminates his head as though he has just been endowed with salvation.
That is the other thing Tennison is walking away from, bless her: the enduring sanctimoniousness of the conventional answer.
If Tennison isn’t some kind of role model, if a life’s work like hers is nothing but failure, then the whole value-system deserves to be walked away from: supposed virtue as well as certifiable vice.
And so I have watched other things.
Among the latest other things has been a large part of the Prime Suspect series, the ones I remember less well, the later ones. Which I remember less well because they are less good, seasons 4-7. They are less granular, less cross-textured; the thinness of the plot line leaves spots where Mirren has to carry the whole show forward with refusal – silence, wordless ambiguity or submissions, head tilting, angle of neck, eyes lowered, eyes turned away. She has a repertoire of these pauses, but they are not enough.
I decided against Season 5 because I couldn't take the savage dog scenes again – the empty swimming pool, the murder. We're in an age of naked savagery: police shootings the new lynching, the new de facto Jim Crow, the government, this hyena regime, attacking women, children, migrants, the homeless, animals, trees, wildlife reserves, anything and everything that is not a particular section of itself.
So I decided on seasons 3, 4, 6, & 7. 3, because it was so intense, because it so deeply concerned police corruption. I'd forgotten David Thewliss and Ciaran Hinds and was glad to see them again, and to find that Vern/Vera is Peter Capaldi. That season also originated the trope of the soprano children's choir, the mystère des voix Bulgares-type threnody for the innocent.
Knowing how it all ends, though I've forgotten the details of the journey, I'm watching these seasons for Helen Mirren, for the sake of watching a very good artist at work. An artist working; somebody, something working. And Prime Suspect is the longest single arc of Helen Mirren's work that we have.
After season 3 there are no women writers. Meredith Oakes has story credit for the first of the three 1995 movie-length episodes of what is not called Prime Suspect 4. The rest are written by men,
The final season is a study in cruelty – Tennison as old & unfuckable, childless, butch-ish, on the verge of dotage; burnt out, alcoholic, quasi-incompetent; alienated, orphaned, futureless. Her face is flat-lit and pale, her blonde hair fading and wispy, her grey skirt the colour of the office curtains and chairs and carpet and corridors. There's nothing left but the occasional white flash of anger in the depths of her blue, blue eyes.
At the end she's slumped on the floor of the interrogation room, next to the just-confessed murderer, a 14 year old girl. The OIC and others enter, having watched the interrogation from behind one-way glass. Mirren says, looking down, "You've got what you wanted," and it seems that one of the meanings of that line is: the complete humiliation and defeat of Detective Superintendent Jane Tennison who, through her own fault, her own impossible refusals and demands, is now so alone and lonely a murderous child sucked her in.
Somehow I do not think that is quite what Lynda La Plante would have done to or with that character.
Yes, the final scene of the episode is of Jane Tennison giving her horrible retirement party the slip (with male stripper in police costume), striding along the footpath into a probably alcohol-free unknown. She is gathered and determined; she refuses to take any part in the kind of party she specifically asked not to have, which features and celebrates the bullying, blokey police culture she was never prepared to join nor able to defeat.
Forsaken, almost human, she sank not beneath their wisdom.
I can see how the concept plays on the page, but that's not the effect of watching The Final Act. One striding-away scene after 3 hours of alcoholic failure as a cop, a daughter, a sister, an aunt, to mother or be a mother, a girlfriend or wife – after three hours of that kind of lighting, the effect is to leave you feeling there is nothing left, that there was never any point to any of it. The bullying, blokey culture would have pinned the tail on the wrong donkey or on none at all; the victims are still dead, their families are still bereft, and there's nothing to say thank you for, or to. Justice is a long way away.
In 2006, the nadir of Bush 2, when Final Act was made, the only hopeful scene on screen was the destruction of the Houses of Parliament in V for Vendetta.
In 2019, watching the sterilization of Tennison's gesture towards legacy, her gift of art to the young girl artist – that is, watching the destruction of the autonomous feminine of two generations, and seeing the hard light and concrete of what's shown to remain – leaves me wretched.
And then suddenly that extraordinary shot flashes into my mind: the shot at the end of the scene in the café where, following the steps of AA, Bill Otley apologizes to Tennison for trying to ruin her career. The last sequence in the café scene shows Tennison walking away. Then the camera goes back to Otley. He looks upward, to his left, mouth hanging open as though gasping for air; the lighting illuminates his head as though he has just been endowed with salvation.
That is the other thing Tennison is walking away from, bless her: the enduring sanctimoniousness of the conventional answer.
If Tennison isn’t some kind of role model, if a life’s work like hers is nothing but failure, then the whole value-system deserves to be walked away from: supposed virtue as well as certifiable vice.
Stained Windows & Xfixes
Mark Mordue reminded me of staring at stained glass windows out of boredom.
What you absorb staring at stained glass out of boredom! At stone or brick walls, through windows, at gardens, statues, sky! (Newtonian gravity slowing the brick's ascending arc, muscles and the sun rippling on the brickie's labourer's back.)
Those Stations of the Cross in so many parish churches: cream bas-relief, the figures so exaggeratedly moulded they seemed about to fall off the wall, Mary & Veronica minor-key harmonics of the anguished Holy Face… rounded calves & thighs, strained & cabled tendons, gaping spear-wounded flesh…
There was a slightly self-conscious modernization in the illustration style of a lot of ecclesiastical art & devotional artefacts & ephemera from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s, of catechisms, prayer-books, rosary beads, saints’ medals, holy pictures, gospel study handouts. The very streamlined illustrations in paper media seemed to emanate from the U.S.
The crucifixes of South Australian Catholic churches & cathedrals from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s were often designed & executed by Middle-European artists who came to Australia after World War II. These were noticeably more symbolic than those of the old style derived from the southern (mostly Italian) renaissance art & its C16-C19th descendants.
I suspect this was symptomatic of new confidence, consumerism, money and medicine: a not necessarily consciously-formulated perception that life was no longer itself a kind of crucifix, no longer had to be "offered up," was no longer predominantly made of or for or by constant difficulty and unrelieved suffering.
What you absorb staring at stained glass out of boredom! At stone or brick walls, through windows, at gardens, statues, sky! (Newtonian gravity slowing the brick's ascending arc, muscles and the sun rippling on the brickie's labourer's back.)
Those Stations of the Cross in so many parish churches: cream bas-relief, the figures so exaggeratedly moulded they seemed about to fall off the wall, Mary & Veronica minor-key harmonics of the anguished Holy Face… rounded calves & thighs, strained & cabled tendons, gaping spear-wounded flesh…
There was a slightly self-conscious modernization in the illustration style of a lot of ecclesiastical art & devotional artefacts & ephemera from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s, of catechisms, prayer-books, rosary beads, saints’ medals, holy pictures, gospel study handouts. The very streamlined illustrations in paper media seemed to emanate from the U.S.
The crucifixes of South Australian Catholic churches & cathedrals from the mid-’60s to the mid-‘70s were often designed & executed by Middle-European artists who came to Australia after World War II. These were noticeably more symbolic than those of the old style derived from the southern (mostly Italian) renaissance art & its C16-C19th descendants.
I suspect this was symptomatic of new confidence, consumerism, money and medicine: a not necessarily consciously-formulated perception that life was no longer itself a kind of crucifix, no longer had to be "offered up," was no longer predominantly made of or for or by constant difficulty and unrelieved suffering.
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