Partial erasure and Atrophy

Partial erasure. Julie Clarke (c) 2017

Atrophy. Julie Clarke (c) 2017

A3 digital prints of the photograph entitled Winter Solstice in which I have erased part of the face and head by using a silver or black permanent marker.

Old knitter of black wool #2

Since I last posted I have become an 'old knitter of black wool'. My intention was to knit 23,000 odd stitches corresponding to the amount of days I've lived, influenced by the two women in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, but then, on consideration I decided that in order to maintain the integrity of the 'found' yarn I would only knit until the wool runs out. I began with 20 stiches and have knitted about 500 lines. The work is currently 140 cm long. I photographed the knitting on a white paper background on 17, 18 and 19 May and was delighted that the result was reminiscent of some of the dark, gestural paintings of Robert Motherwell (It was not only I who could see the resemblance). I imagine now that when the piece is finished I will do a 66 second video performance with the spoken words piece I did in 1980. Old and young body and voice will collide.

On the 15 May I saw Alien: Covenant, which was absolutely fantastic and a timely return to horror genre and welcome revival of the alien. I saw the Vincent Van Gough exhibition at NGV International on 19 May the night after I had a dream of a sea of white Dutch girl's hats. Although his renditions of the four seasons paintings were beautiful, I have to admit I preferred paintings in which he used a more sombre palette. One of my first attempts at painting when I was fourteen was to copy one of Van Gough's self portraits. And, speaking about my younger days, David Powell emailed me a digital copy of the spoken word and percussion piece called 'Down' I performed on tape in 1980, (He, myself and my three year old son were called 'The Grand Facade', a group of experimental music makers). Listening, I recalled the youthful me.

Yesterday I spoke briefly with Bernhard Sachs who was taking a photo of something in a shop window in Chapel Street, Windsor and this morning I photographed Venus in the dark, morning sky.

Film Review - Unstoppable

Tony Scott's 2010 film Unstoppable (Twentieth Century Fox, 2010) stars Denzel Washington and Chris Pine as two downtrodden railway employees trying to stop a runaway train.

Frank (Washington) and Will (Pine) are respectively driver and conductor of a railway train on a routine journey. A mistake by the youthful and inexperienced Will puts him at odds with the experienced Frank and places them both in jeopardy when a driverless train is discovered speeding their way.

The monster locomotive and its load of toxic chemicals, accidentally unleashed from a railway yard by an underperforming worker, hurtles at breakneck speeds toward the small town where Will’s estranged family lives. As the remote and dysfunctional railway management unsuccessfully attempts to stop the half-mile long behemoth, the two workers must overcome the odds, their managers, and mutual antipathy, in a last-ditch bid to avert disaster.

Unstoppable is a film about working class heroes. With only days to enforced retirement the experienced Frank first saves his own train and then takes off in pursuit of the runaway. "You would risk your life for us?" an incredulous manager asks. "not for you", Frank replies.

The film presents a workplace - perhaps a whole economy - in chaos. Experienced workers are dumped a few years before retirement, on half benefits, and replaced by high-tech equipment and enthusiastic but inexperienced younger men. Under pressure, the inexperienced workers make a series of small mistakes with giant consequences that leave two trains hurtling toward each other on the same track. It is up to the divided workforce, symbolized in an evolving relationship between Frank and Will, to do what management cannot, and to save a small town from high tech disaster.

The characters are carefully drawn by writer Mark Bomback. Frank has two daughters, waitresses at a saucy Hooters restaurant franchise "working their way through college". Will’s estranged wife and young son are caught up in a fuss over suspected sexting, a hint of domestic violence, and an intervention order. New ways are colliding with the old, and the characters must accommodate those and overcome their own prejudices and fears before they can collaborate to stop the unstoppable.

The management types are barely drawn stereotypical offcuts from modern management manuals. A top company man speculates on the railway's share price from a golf course. Galvin (Kevin Dunn), the operations manager in a high-rise corner office, completely ignores his staff - including the competent but female local manager Connie (Rosario Dawson) - in favour of high tech outsourcing and expensive and big-noting contractors.

Hope springs only when the workers place their bodies between the runaway train and the small town it is hurtling toward.

Breathtaking stunts, stunning arial photography by Ben Seresin and seamlessly integrated CGI provide vivid panoramas for the story to unfold in. A half-mile train lifting its wheels from tracks as it speeds around a curve is a suitably impressive spectacle, especially with Denzel Washington leaping from carriage to carriage as Frank and Will attempt to avert catastrophe.

Unstoppable is a thoughtful film based in part on real events but in part also in the zeitgeist of modern economics and workplace restructuring and change. Those seem unstoppable, unless the old and new combine to produce something more. It is this something more that is evident in the story, and which lifts it above the ruck of the average disaster/disaster averted movie.

joy for ever

...Its lovliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing...

John Keats (Enymion,1818)

Private school girls + public transport manners should be on the currriculum

I caught a crowded tram in Camberwell yesterday and since I was carrying two heavy bags I asked one of the school girls if she wouldn't mind giving me her seat. She grudgingly complied. At the next stop an older woman got on and was struggling to balance with the movement of the tram, so I asked if she would like to sit down. She said 'No, I won't accept a seat from an adult, I want one of the rich, private school girls to offer one to me'! I turned around and looked at the girls occupying the seats. Most wouldn't have heard her, three were speaking loudly on mobile phones, their feet up on the seats opposite, their summer school dresses hitched up almost to their thighs, their bags thrown onto the floor beneath their feet, often in the aisle, which made it difficult for standing adults straddling available space.

She continued: 'One day they'll know what it's like, they'll be old with hip problems, they'll'..., and she broke off looking at their disinterested faces, 'No, they'll be in their four wheel drives, they won't have to take public transport, they'll be living in their million dollar houses'! 

One of the adults offered heir seat and she finally sat down, but I thought about what she said and I considered the fact that parents of these girls have paid up to, perhaps more than $200,000 in fees for their children to attend private schools and apart from scholastic achievement what the schools had produced was inconsiderate, selfish, loud, uncaring beings.
But I should be fair about this, I'm sure that not all private school individuals behave in this manner and admittedly, public transport is crowded, particularly so after 3.30pm when children are traveling home. The new trams don't have over-head luggage racks as they did in the past and so the large school bags that children/teenagers have to carry do take up a lot of space on the floor  inhibiting movement and creating dangerous obstacles. The older woman showed me a small red wound, she had just come off another tram filled with private school children and had tripped over one of their bags, scraping her wrist in the process! No wonder she was angry. At the age of 75 she shouldn't have to endure this.

The absence of tram conductors over the past decade has meant that behavior on public transport has worsened, indeed, teenagers (but not only them) have come to regard public transport as a site of social engagement, using the space to eat, drink, listen to music and talk loudly with their  friends, without considering that workers and others traveling on the tram may need a bit of quite time to read their book or just relax on their trip.

I'm not sure who to hold to account here, schools, parents, the government or the individual.? But when I think about it, we all have a responsibility for each other and perhaps if the message isn't being relayed at home where values are instigated,  then perhaps it should be considered part of the responsibility of teachers to instill in their students good manners and consideration for others.

Sam Jinks

Two overly-large snails in a shimmering, sensual and sticky embrace. A small old woman in night-dress gently holding a new born babe and a somewhat stooped and sinister figure draped in a long white gown. There are only three sculptures in the latest Sam Jinks exhibition at Karen Woodley Gallery, but they are all absolutely glorious, not only in their precision of execution, but in their ability to create pathos in the viewer. There is certainly some affinity here between Jinks Woman and Child (2010) and the hyper-realistic sculptures of Ron Mueck, particularly his Old Woman in Bed (2002) however, because Jinks has depicted the old woman holding a new born he speaks directly to the nature of intimacy & ageing and taps into our fears about the fragility and eventual disintegration of the body. Indeed, his the devil halfway (2010) shrouds the figure of a body so thin that the contours of the spine and ribs show through the back of the fabric. There a subtle beauty here in Jinks approach to the body that was, at least for me, not found in Mueck's larger figures in his exhibition at the NGV earlier this year. I guess there will always be some comparison between aspects of these artists work, but I have to say that ultimately I prefer Jinks's sculptures. My lovely son accompanied me to this exhibition and graciously drove me home so that I wouldn't get cold.

Ageing

Ageing is my issue today and I can hear you saying that we are all aging from the moment we are born and that's true, but I'm talking about the kind of ageing that suddenly emerges at a time in which the body reveals its disintegration into something less than desirable because it doesn't function as well as it used to. It's not only that we don't look the way we did when we were younger, but we can't take anything for granted. Gone is the total trust that we could run for the bus without the possibility of injury ~ these days I still run, it's a habit, but I'm often stopped dead in my tracks, not by a lack of energy but by my knee, which buckles underneath and threatens to make me fall. I find that things that were not heavy at all in the past are now a great burden. I'm sure the hill I climb on my way home is getting steeper. I've often wondered why old people walked slowly ~ I thought that they were tired, in pain, or because of their age they were in a kind of stasis that made them slow and contemplative. I suspect now, because of my own experiences that they move at that pace because they are being careful not to fall. All that walking I've done ~ because I love to be able to stop and look at a tree or study the sky and because the exercise is good for me, has caused wear and tear and my hips, which are beginning to hurt. Of course, we ignore all of this malfunctioning and just get on with things. Flashes of childhood memories jump into your mind at the oddest times ~ you suddenly remember something that you hadn't thought of for years ~ a song that was on the radio when you were three ~ the next door neighbours dog, who tried to hump you when you were eighteen years old ~ not sure where that thought came from ~ perhaps it was about my ability to be on my knees in the garden ~ don't think I could do that easily today! And when you get older you don't really care that much what other people think of you ~you have nothing to prove. I am at the stage where I can leave cleaning the kitchen floor for yet another day because I know that if I do any cleaning I'll get pain in my neck. Thank goodness that the clean police are not scheduled to visit today! I think my sense of humour has improved ~ I took a series of digital photos of myself last night ~ to document my visual aging (I trashed most of them) ~ I'm fascinated by the wrinkles and folds that have appeared, aging has turned me into a strange creature with elephant skin ~ no amount of moisturising will change that. Nothing to do now except observe.

A thought on ageing

I know why old people have that certain look on their face. It is a knowing look, a resignation. They sit on a park bench or city seat with a look on their face that reflects faces of people they've known in the past, like all the expressions have taken up residence in the fine cracks on their skin and in the look in their eyes.

They watch young people dart pass, gleefully unaware that the people who they love right now, people they loathe right now and others in their lives, whether they like it or not, are going to return to them as flashes of memory. Ghosts, like the pungent odour of garlic on the breath or onion on your fingers, continue to exert their power and presence.

I am not quite that old. The kind of old that makes you totally resigned to your fate and the things around you. An oldness that makes you walk so slowly that those watching wonder whether you are really going anywhere, except down to the shops with your carry bag in one hand and your purse in another and then back home again with a litre of milk and a fresh new loaf of bread that will last for days, because you live alone. The bread will only be half-eaten because mold will form on the crusts and you won't cut it off and eat the salvaged bread, even to save money. Milk is quite heavy to carry when you are old!

I'm talking here about an oldness that has crept into your bones and your muscles, that tells you, you are no longer strong; fierce wind can easily move you so much so, that you have to hold onto a pole to stop from falling. An oldness that makes you vulnerable to heat and cold, a state of being that makes you look suspiciously at younger, energetic people, who eat fast food and who are always loud and excited, on the move, talking endlessly on their mobile phones. An oldness that makes you move your body quickly sideways (and that's not easy) to avoid small children in the tram who swing their legs around wildly and who threaten with each move to kick your delicate, delicate shins.

I am old enough that ghosts - memories of the past are beginning to invade my thoughts and things in my home. I can tell because they constantly assert themselves. I am here. You can almost hear them saying it. There they are, all the ghosts of the past. I'll sit with that for a moment.

Yes, ghosts are not only people from the past, for their faces are no longer distinct; ghosts are the feelings that surround events, the minutia of life, the dust that always settles on the sideboard even though you dusted two days ago, the fact that your fingernails grow so quickly, but you never notice until they are suddenly long. So, ageing is about time and the way if flows or escapes you!

When did my nails grow long again, didn’t I spend time the other night cutting and filing them and thinking that I might paint them with bright red nail polish? Well - perhaps not red, but something pink and unobtrusive that tells the world I am sensible and middle-aged. As if the two somehow go together.

‘I see that you are wearing your nails, natural?’ says the young female sales assistant in the city centre. 'I have a nail buffer that will make them shine brilliantly’. You know that this is about her making a sale of some new product. Of course it will work, but she doesn't know that I'm not an easy target for her 'sweet to the customers' smile. I held out my hand and she shines one nail until it looks out of place amongst all the others, which now seem so terribly dull and lack luster.