The Mentruum 17: Dear Jeremy

[First published in Inpress magazine, 23.02.2011]

And out of the blue a message from Jeremy Day, that he is back in the world, and more than that, in this town. I lived with Jeremy years ago in a student house in Milton, with the XXXX brewery at the top of the hill making the suburb smell of burned honey in the late afternoons. 

We shared a wall and I would hear him typing and typing for days straight; I would find crazed, remarkable stories slid under my door, their illustrations would appear on the walls – he was brilliant and untethered and a friend, and then we split ways. He overseas, me undergraduate.

I would get letters from him, undated, the length of phone books in miniscule hand-type, written over three days with wine, smokes, mushrooms but no sleep. He would paint me visions, crooked: “... seagulls the size of small horses wheel through the sky ...  there is nothing to do in this place but work & drink & rot in dingy flats ... there are no seats or benches in this unholy city.”

Silence, then I would discover a novel he’d written in an envelope at my doorstep. Then another. Unbearable, crazy, perfect things. “Are you calling me a coward, sir? I’ll fight all of you, me with my hands behind my back if I must, though I would prefer them untied. I’m no coward. I wrestled a jack-rabbit for sixpence at last year’s fair ... I’ve hunted dormice on horseback ...” 

Then letters, more, again: “I am really digging visuals, the architecture of Gaudi, that melting drooping shimmering scaled organismic peculiarity, or the tendrils & coils of Nouveau, or the distortions of Escher.” Common tales made uncommon: “I vowed to smoke the remainder of the pot in the next city – Prague, Prague, magic city with monks & toy soldiers with real guns.”

Those around him would be drawn: “He has aspirations to write and paint but he seems too tied to money and is too reluctant to burn his bridges.” Six months after the fact: “My mum is sending you my ragged book, but for me it is merely a distant memory, forgive my flaws.”

Christ, the pamphlets he sent. Schisms, poems, more stories and those incredible, ill and illogical illustrations.“It is all bullshit. NEVER read English philosophers.”

Jeremy Day, Lockpicking Foxes, 2000s.

“I am still sick, my body has had no time to recover, but I am happy, at least in this moment, but now I have drunk my last drop of beer & am incredibly tired, writing nonstop, exhausted, brain malfunctioning, write a long letter back, promise?”

He would recoil to be called this, but Jeremy Day is an artist, and Melbourne’s population of thoughtful thing-makers has just increased by one. He may make noises here, I hope so. I found out later that most of my letters never made it; I was always three change-of-addresses behind him. Well, Jez, let this be my most recent of many more.     

“... there is so much still to say.”



.

DUST FROM OFF ITS WINGS - The Australian Ballet and Rudy Hawke's Madame Butterfly

AND CEILING AND WALLS: THE CURTAIN RISES ON 1904 NAGASAKI AND NAVAL OFFICER, PINKERTON, AS HE IS TO MARRY HIS TEENAGE BRIDE, BUTTERFLY. THE AUSTRALIAN BALLET BEGINS 2011 WITH ITS IMAGINING OF THE OPERA IMMORTAL, MADAME BUTTERFLY, AND LEAD DANCER RUDY HAWKES TAKES ROBERT LUKINS FOR A TURN. 

Rudy Hawkes in The Nutcracker. Photograph by Jeff Busby.

“I don't really know, sorry, I don't have a TV.” Hawkes bats away a question about the impact and implications of dance in popular film and television with the ease it deserves. “But I do think those shows are good in that they bring dance into the lounge room of people who might not have the time, money or motivation to go to the theatre.” Recently announced as one of six finalists of the yet-to-be announced 2011 Telstra Ballet Dancer Award, he is rightly keen to give thought to more due topics.  

Accepting the central role of Pinkerton in The Australian Ballet’s first outing for the year, Hawkes understands the canonical narrative into which he is to be a player. Conceived as an opera by Giacomo Puccini in the early years of the twentieth century, the story of a brutish West causing injury to an unready, brittle East has become an arts house staple. Having been on tour internationally for over a decade, Australian choreographer Stanton Welch’s transfigured production has returned to the shores of its birth.

“I’m extremely excited about performing the role of Pinkerton. It’s very challenging both technically and artistically.” This performance satisfies a lifelong desire for Hawkes and provides a challenge to more typical roles. “Growing up I always aspired to perform in full length story ballets with the beautiful pas de deux and tricky lifts. The only surprising thing I initially found about the character, Pinkerton, is that he is not your typical romantic lead. He’s not very respectful of the Japanese culture and he’s very naive about the consequences of his actions.”

Rudy Hawkes. Photograbh by James Braund.

Indeed, the character is something of a half-intended monster. Like the overgrown puppy that bounds into a room, smashing over vases with its ecstatic tail and tearing up the furniture and children of its loved master, Pinkerton is an embodiment of casual supremacy. In a cocoon of thought, regretful and doomed, his trajectory foresaw North America’s as the century unfurled. “Madame Butterfly is not just a tragic love story,” Hawkes is clear, “it is about the coming together of two very different cultures for the first time and its consequences.”

For Pinkerton, his tragedy is that of his bride’s, beauty’s, suicide. For Rudy, the task is to walk with his audience as we tread the line been sympathy and antipathy. This connection, this cotton thread between performer and the crowd, is a source of meaning for Hawkes. 

Madame Buterfly Production shot. Photograph by Paul Empson.

When questioned on the very purpose of dance, on its facility to make any difference, he recalls moments of lives meeting. “Being on stage you get a feeling of what the audience is experiencing during a performance. We have witnessed them laugh out loud and cry, the theatre has been chillingly silent and we have received standing ovations. Personally, it is a huge part of who I am and it affects me and my friends and colleagues every day.”

WHAT: The Australian Ballet, Madame Butterfly.

WHERE & WHEN: The Arts Centre, State Theatre. Fri 25 Feb to Wednesday 9 March.

The Menstruum 16: “...may be beneficial during times of sadness.”

Can you live forever underwater – how would that work? I know you can dance down there, I’ve seen it. 

Tess Kelly, Poppy 3, 2010.

Saint John’s Wort: I’d been buying and eating that junk for twelve years without a break. It has always just been there, going in my mouth with other things, things that have actual medicine behind them, and the wording on the Wort bottles is careful, careful it doesn’t make any claims beyond aspiration. So I keep buying it and keep hoofing it. But seven days ago I ran out and I’ve been a dumb mess for seven days; the whole bit, big crying, starting fights, throwing the cook book across the room. I say certain words and am told to never say them again, that they don’t belong in our world. She’s right, and I will never say them again.  

I am one lucky fuck.

At the end of this, in the rain, I drop the car at the Convent and bus it to Gore Street. It’s empty and the lights don’t seem fully on but I walk into Colour Factory – it’s a photo shop, it’s a gallery, it may or may not be open, and Tess Kelly and Julia Norlander have a joint show until February 26 filling this white rectangle.

It makes sense that these photographs are together and paraded like a couple, tangled in a soup. What we have are bare women and the grey lines of rib you can see from the back. Women shrouded with their own beauty. Landscapes with backgrounds excised – cut out like cancerous noses. There are a garden’s people, flowers, stood tall and caught in the midst of Saint Vitus' Dance.       

Julia Norlander, TBC

A woman has appeared at reception and locked the front door – I don’t know if I should be in here, if she knows I am.

A film is rolling against a wall, of a woman and her body under green water, overwhelming and dancing. This show floors me. This thing, Tess and Julia’s things, are a marvel and I have a volley of words in my ear, not mine, buzzing: While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue...   

Tess Kelly, TBC, 2010.

I always thought I would end up in one of those boarding houses for single old men; I nearly moved into one in Fortitude Valley. The doors to the rooms are sliding, on rollers not hinges. The gnarled old blokes sit all day on the steps, smoking and sizing you up. But then I met Paige, and remembered how things could be, and I don’t want to end up in a dormitory for widowers and ex-junkies, so I talk to the woman at reception and she tells me to turn the key in the door to the left to get out, I walk the five minutes to the Chemist Warehouse and buy the St. John’s Wort and I keep moving forward, I buy new jeans on sale. I take the tablets and the tram and I look forward to getting home.    

THE MENSTRUUM 15: Summer Rain

The corner of Elizabeth Street and Lonsdale and the racerboy piece of shit just scorched through the very red light. I wish fear inspired poetry in me, but it doesn’t and all I can think of the shaven bulldog in the black hatchback with the English flag stickers and bad house pumping from tinny speakers is that he’s a piece of shit.

He misses me by the width of one small step, skids into the path of a tram, and “fuck it – fuckwit,” is what I say to his wound-down window, which doesn’t make enough sense. A woman walking towards us is cross and is shouting, “you nearly hit that man!” “Fook off,” he chews and takes off in front of the dinging tram.

I keep walking to 1000 £ Bend and think this is a tiny and personal thing and it wasn’t a tragedy, only vaguely close, and I’m angry and not used to the feeling. Something colossal and actually horrible happens and most people are drawn toward good feelings, and some, good actions. I walk past a homeless woman. I wonder why it’s easier to see the shape of your better self against the backdrop of something tremendous and bad.

Photograph by Kealey Nutt

On Little Lonsdale, inside 1000 £ and Thelma Magazine are running a fundraising exhibition until February fifteen in aid of the Queensland’s wind and wetness. The room is all colour and warmth and with the sounds of coffee. Art is hanging near and on the walls, making a piebald and sweet perimeter made of all stripes; line sketches, photographs, oils, stamped seafarers and beautiful faces dripping with watercolour. Today there are market stalls, and like the art on sale the money raised is heading to the soggy and broken north-east. Two women are standing to the side of me and they are very good-looking. One is interested in a pair of small, mouse-brown shoes. “... if you had the option of ending it all right now, would you? What would you say ...?” I don’t know what they’re talking about.

Photograph by Kealey Nutt.

I do a slow lap of the room and go and sit and have one of the coffees. Waiting, I spill the sugar, check my telephone and see a message I’d missed from Joann, my sister – she’d been bailed up by Yasi: “That was truly horrible. Don’t want to play the game again. Now hoping water back on soon and power would be nice. May send boys to grandmas.”

The exhibition room is loaded with light and energetic hearts and I find the picture I like and can afford the best and write my name and number on the silent auction sheet below. I write the amount I get paid for this column. In the toilet near the bar, I’m now worrying about paying rent this month and thinking of ways to worry less. On the way back out, there’s a post-it on the light switch, “Please leave the light on – B. Carlisle.”   

ALONE RANGER: Andrea Jenkins at 45downstairs

A SITE OF MASS TRANSIT, GUTTED OF ITS PEOPLE AND BUSINESS IS A COLD PLACE INDEED; THIS IS THE WORLD ANDREA JENKINS PRESENTS TO ROBERT LUKINS – THE WORLD OF COMINGS AND GOINGS, HER EXHIBITION OF SOLITARY MAN IN A TRANSIENT ENVIRONMENT.

Andrea Jenkins, Comings and Goings #12, 2010.

“And this is why I sojourn here, Alone and palely loitering ...” Keats was writing of being thrown loveless and without purpose to the side of a once-flourishing lakeside, now barren. Given a ride to the present day and a 2-hour concession ticket to Zone 1, little John could rightly feel an affinity with this collection of scenes offered by Jenkins: train stations, underpasses and alleys all sucked of their oxygen and crowds.

These works, she explains, are a continuation of a larger project of documenting the Victorian capital. “It was a progression. I had been painting Melbourne from above, the alleys and such. I took a few snaps of the stations subways which I decided had a good feel to them. I love that grungy look, but the hauntiness was what really appealed to me. After a few paintings I then got a sense of where I was going with them and the metaphor of life as a train journey seemed apt, with the station being the beginning and end.”

The works depict settings that will be familiar to any Melbourne traveller, focussing on the escalators, causeways and stairs; machines and structures that imply or demand continual movement from their human subjects. Jenkins’ figures are unaccompanied, absent or without detail. “Loneliness, yes.” I suggest there is a common emotion at the core of these pictures. “It’s about our own journey which in essence is a solitary trek. Sadness in the beginning, because the image number three [Comings and Goings #3] coincided with a very good friend taking his life and my thoughts were led towards decisions we make, but they are not all sad.”

Andrea Jenkins, Comings and Goings #3, 2007

Solitude and its despondency as only a starting point is an important distinction made by this artist and her show. It is easy to render an excluding urban vision – Kafka’s word cities, Edward Hopper illustrations – but it is another thing to see this dirty grey slab as an opportunity for a beginning; an unpainted canvas, an unpopulated Word document, is as dreary a thing, but is similarly as liberating as it is a reminder of a ruined world.    

Jenkins’ belief in the impacting quality of art is refreshing and underpins her reply to questioning of her exhibition’s purpose. She speaks in specifics. “Art as painting, perhaps only affects those of us who actually take the time to view it. I hope that my art affects those who view it in a good way,” she upholds, giving weight to a simple idea. “Please take the time.”

Andrea Jenkins, Comings and Goings #15, 2010

Back to Keats, that heartsick and eternal teenager – the brilliance of his paeans to pained solitude were in the purposefulness of their self-defeat: in giving isolation voice, an audience, it turns to water. To Andrea: are we all, at heart, alone? “I hope so,” she says. “I don’t think of alone as a negative thing, it is simply being one’s self. Separate, single, living your own life; no-one else’s.”

WHAT: Comings and Goings

WHERE & WHEN: fortyfivedownstairs gallery, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne. Tuesday 8 Feb to Saturday 19 Feb.  

THE MENSTRUUM 14: The Grot of Proserpine

[First published in Inpress magazine, 02.02.2011]

My hands are still slightly shaking from having carried sixty litres of cow manure from the boot of the car to the back garden. I now know that sixty litres is not as great an amount of manure as it might sound, but still, more than I could conveniently produce and store on my own.  

It’s a Saturday afternoon and it made sense to combine the journey to Hell Gallery with a drop in at Bunnings. Hell, it turns out, is at 5a Railway Place, Richmond – it’s just behind the Coles, which is handy. Until February 19 it’s playing house to (Tasmania Is An Anagram Of) I Am Satan, a return exchange with Hobart artist-run thingy, INFLIGHT.

We arrive, getting sunburned, and still stiff from the parking ticket machine that ate my $1.30 and proceeded to just make noises. Hell, much like the rest of Richmond, has the feel of an overflown student sharehouse; a two-for-one pizza voucher, funny and chipped seventies lamp, whatever’s-on-special beer slab kind of flavour. No-one’s parents have visited Richmond in a while, so things have, just, sort of, gotten away from us a bit.

A friendly and weary bespectacled man is picking up empties and adding to the stack by the bins when I walk in off the street. “Excuse the mess.” Over the trodden fag ends, bottletops, in the far corner is the showing room and inside are seventeen revisions of Apple Isle gothica. A cyst-red Beelzebub is blinged out and standing amid a ground of coloured toothpicks. A corner is an alter of skewered plasticine, grapes and failing mushrooms. “You don’t just get a place in hell, you earn it.” All this to the naturally awful scowling of Andrew Harper reading Ted Hughes – the sound of it repeatedly sticking a dirty knitting needle in your ear.

The Holy Trinity, Performance video still, 2010. Courtesy of Hell Gallery.

There is a well-pummelled idea that to show even echoes of effort is to proclaim oneself as unread. There is a difficult and painful to locate place in ourselves, and there is Tasmaniahipster Hades. All is as it should be.         

The driveway of Port Melbourne Bunnings is happily choking. On the way in we have to avoid Guy Pearce carrying a really decent length of two-by-four. All I can manage is, “Hey guy, whatchit, you nearly pierced me,” and that’s twenty seconds too late and not nearly good enough to go back and shout over the carpark.

We do laps and buy a shovel, picture wire, a cutlery drawer and sixty-six average human stomach capacity’s worth of cow shit. As the man tries to find the barcode on our new doormat I think about how I fit art shows into my week, like filling up with petrol, like getting my coffee card stamped and getting the seventh one free.

A guy with dreads and a beret once told me that the only answer was to become art yourself, that you must yourself be beautiful – with everything that means.

I’m trying, I swear, I really am trying.