JON CATTAPAN
Night Visions
21 August - 19 September 2009
Preview: Friday 21 August, 6-pm
Kaliman Gallery
56 Sutherland St, Paddington, Sydney

This latest body of work relates to Jon Cattapan’s recent visit to East Timor where he was researching an Australian War Memorial commission. The night vision equipment used by the Australian soldiers became a focus of his research. The result is a series of blue and green toned works, reminiscent of the visual perspective and representation night vision equipment employs. Soldiers in combat gear, army vehicles and army equipment populate the surfaces of the paintings. Jon Cattapan submerges these figurative elements in the patterns of weather maps and night vision data so that they are woven together as part of a brilliantly coloured nocturnal fabric.


               (cover detail, but the red is wrong, too orange here, my old scanner)

Chris McAuliffe’s monograph on Jon Cattapan, Possible Histories, reviewed by Ian North in Artlink.

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ABC1 TV Artscape: Artists At Work: Jon Cattapan
10:00pm - Tuesday, August 25
Over the last 30 years, Jon Cattapan has established a reputation as one of Australia's most significant and prolific painters. Often described as 'the poet of the floating metropolis', much of Cattapan's work responds to the notion of what it means to be a human being in the 21st century urban environment.
He is best known for his large cityscape paintings which reveal the shifting dynamics of the metropolis - charting the endless flow of information and mapping the psychological trajectory of its inhabitants.
In July 2008, Cattapan decided to take a risk and step outside of his urban milieu. After years of deliberation he finally agreed to become an official war artist for the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and was deployed to Timor Leste. To his surprise what followed was an experience he describes as "one of my luckiest breaks in my life".
Artscape: Artists At Work follows Cattapan's journey to Timor Leste and then back to his studio, in an outer suburb of Melbourne, where he creates a series of art works for the AWM, based on his unique experiences as a war artist.
(Artscape: Artists At Work: Jon Cattapan will be repeated on ABC2
Sunday, August 30 at 7pm http://abc.net.au/iview/)

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                              Vale Willy de Ville


                    Obituaries :
                          one
                          two
                          three
                          four

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The reviewer I mentioned last weekend might be able to answer his perplexed question regarding Les Murray and Lionel Fogarty by reading Lyn McCredden’s The Locatedness of Poetry in the latest issue of JASAL (Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature)

Here’s the abstract :
This essay argues that understanding the locatedness of poetry is crucial as a measure by which to sift the high rhetorics of national, cosmopolitan, globalising discourses. In an analysis of the poetry of Indigenous writers Tony Birch, Sam Wagan Watson and Lionel Fogarty, and of the Federal Government's Apology to the Stolen Generations, we can see more clearly the role of literature, and particularly poetry, in debates between the local and the global.

Click HERE for the index and scroll down to the article.
It’s there as a pdf.

Here's the question :

criminal daze

Yesterday I went to see Matteo Garrone’s film of Roberto Saviano’s novel about the Camorra syndicate in Naples and Caserta, Italy - Gomorrah. It’s a powerful exposé of corruption and of the brutal methods used to recruit young men who become so entangled in the web of crime that they have no choice but to continue living in a truly violent world. Only a few can even contemplate escape. Mattone deftly mixes and melds five stories into one. An extraordinary film of a cruel and frightening aspect of Italy that tourists only hear, read or see films about.




This afternoon I went to hear Peter Doyle give an illustrated talk on his cultural history of Sydney in the 1920s via records of criminals of the day. He has just published another book Crooks Like Us, after having spent many, many hours delving into the forensic photography archive at Sydney’s Justice & Police Museum.








Peter Doyle curated an exhibition of photos and published an accompanying book City of Shadows in 2005.



                                                Peter Doyle

Many Sydneysiders also know Peter as “Peter ‘Rockin’ Doyle”, the amazing guitarist from the bands Wasted Daze, The Magnetics and The Bopcats that played around the inner western suburbs in the mid-late 1970s.
Since then he has completed a PhD, written a novel, The Devil’s Jump, and finically researched the police archives to write the criminal history books and he is now an academic teaching media at Macquarie University. Of course, he still likes to boogie - the Doyle-Bongers Downhome Quartet – a roots blues jazz funk steel guitar and saxophone combo was getting into the groove as I left the event.


     Click to enlarge -Assembled bands The Bopcats, The Layabouts, Ratbags of Rhythm
      Peter Doyle in white shirt fifth from the right

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I like this perplexed question from a review of a new blockbuster anthology of Australian literature in today's Sydney Morning Herald.

Rehab for Everyone

hands so cold 
             fingers cold 
tucked under legs
   sitting in insect hiss 
           low white noise
   gas heater undertone 
        no other sound 
                              nothing 

almost asleep, 
       a car pulling up the hill

        a currawong 
  does that shrill thing 
                    into pink air

a huge open yawn 
           almost breaks my jaw

  the pen that makes the marks 
            alters the angles of the letters

a patch 
       of  yesterday’s chocolate 
              stuck to my corduroy sleeve -
a signal 
         imagined and interpreted

we look back 
            at the years in the tops
     waiting to be taken out of time

red brick 
       wall map of Australia 
      grass green carpet
mustard coloured plastic chairs 
          clumpy piling on the mittens

mitts on the keyboard 
         pushing thoughts and jingles
                                                out 
   to Dublin to Seattle, 
            Adelaide, Kane`ohe, 
                       Faversham, Glebe

sadly notating dim trivia 
        me-minus-you 
                    outside community

literary festivals 
           can’t help anyone 
       like a rehab book sale

making mistakes, 
             so different 
      from being morally wrong

in an unsettling world 
              it‘s a rabbit life,
built the walls from Castrol cases 

black tyre ribbons
                  strewn 
       like a giant’s licorice 
under the striated cutting
             siding on the highway, 
say goodbye 
           to the Woodford bends

sometimes the clunky 
             can incandesce 
      but I want to know
how to vitalize gawkiness, 

      sometimes 
I’m in my no-mind     sometimes 
          in a technological mindlessness 
  sometimes nowhere near limber, 
                          although that’s unusual

some people 
          just float along all the time 
     accumulating the placid

       sometimes 
 when you think you’re going down 
                   you’re not,
you’re going straight ahead 
                         to a utopia of modernity.