Flow

On the phone recently my former studio parter, the highly creative and visionary craft practitioner Pauline Tran, had a question for me and this blog. 

"Have you written about flow?"

She meant creative flow, that term coined by Hungarian psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a key proponent of the positive psychology movement (if that doesn't mean anything to to you he is one of the USA based academic fraternity studying the pursuit of happiness, or pursuing happiness, or both). 

It isn't a subject I've tackled, though it's something I think about often and describe tangentially when I'm reflecting on creative projects and collaborations. Of course, we were both thinking about how fricken' hard it is to achieve this state while you are in that highly tactile stage of mothering small children – or children with disabilities – enmeshmed  in their emotional and physical needs.

What does it take, to find the space to create the conditions for creativity? I know that a sense of safety and solitude are important, or at the very least uninterrupted time – enough of it – to allow for energies to quieten and thoughts to sharpen. There has to be time for false starts and true procrastination.

Time, on its own, however, is not enough though.

Finding a way of transitioning from the one thousand and one demands of the here and into the realm of imagination, art making or laying words down requires passing over an uncomfortable threshold.

Changing roles without resorting to crazy-making compartmentalising (the kind that causes internal schisms) requires self awareness and discipline. But creativity makes additional demands. It asks its subjects to be vulnerable, receptive, and curious. 

I'm often gripped by agitation anticipating getting down to work. 

Every person engaged in creative work has their own way of smoothing the passage but utilising a "third space" to shift gear and decompress is critical. 

Driving – moving from home to studio setting – can be enough, so long as it takes time. Mindlessly gazing into the fridge and foraging around the pantry can be a good tactic. But my go-to is walking. Walking is the ticket. 

Of course once you're in, absorbed in the work, joys abound. I love the feeling of discovery, things coming together, exercising capability and skill. Facing and overcoming technical and other issues, no drama. It's in this state that I often have a rush of self recognition: as in I am communing with some essential part of myself and I'm least self conscious.

The capacity to find and inhabit this space is always a huge relief. Though I am able to find my way there, when I visualise creativity it is always in my mind's eye a beautiful, wild stallion: majestic, untamed and afraid. I'm aware that I have to approach it with utmost care and be very, very still in order to gain its trust. When I think about this metaphor – which is always vivid – I know that it's telling me in simple terms that that the horse might bolt but it also reminds me that creativity is unpredictable and in some regards a dangerous undertaking.  

The Florida Project

The Florida Project (Sean Baker, 2017), an indie feature film set on the fringes of Disney World in Florida, documents the life of the working poor and unemployed – single mums, carers, the self-medicating and misfits –who get by, pay check-to-pay check, living in a constellation of down at heel hotels on the scrappy outskirts of the town.

Six-year-old Moonee (the incredible Brooklynn Prince) and her mum Haley (Bria Vinate) rent a hotel room crammed with their possessions, a blanket over the window and large a TV screen at the foot of the bed. The hotel is managed by the industrious Bobby (the wonderful Willem Dafoe) doing his best to enforce rules, undertake repairs and extract payments from his errant tenants.

While the film occasionally shifts perspective to Bobby or Haley Florida Project centres on vibrant and inventive Moonee as she roams the pastel hued hotel grounds, the adjacent swamplands and nearby highways in search of adventure with her gang of friends. These unsupervised excursions frame the small children against absurdly oversized shop fronts: gross theatrical backdrops, vernacular icons of mid twentieth century pop and consumer culture and exploits them to great effect. Occasionally they cross paths with civilians: horrified tourists landing at the hotel on the back of badly made online accommodation bookings, pedophiles looking to take advantage of the unsupervised children, hospitality workers.

I’ve not seen Baker’s other films so I can’t compare its tone its predecessors. He is a director influenced by vérité film traditions and improvisation; whether you like the film will depend on how you lean. 

Moonee happily accompanies her mum as they schlep a bag of perfumes around to the more salubrious hotels, dodging staff, and cajoling tourists into making a purchase with practiced flirtatious wit. She is largely oblivious to the downward direction of their lives. But Haley’s increasingly desperate measures to provide a roof over their head and the ramifications of her actions – ranging from social ostracization to the attention of the authorities – means the film unfolds with a grim inevitability.

What are we to make of Haley? With social skills that could easily garner her an appearance on the Hard Prisons reality TV series, she is difficult to like or empathise with. Neither neglectful nor caring she approaches parenting with the part-time commitment of a foul mouthed primary school buddy. And while she includes Moonee in her escapades, she has no capacity for modelling emotional regulation or an inclination to protect her daughter from the antisocial behaviour that surrounds them. 

The Florida Project draws a line between the stresses on Haley’s life and her behaviour – erratic, unbalanced, vengeful, inarticulate –  and asks that audiences view it in the context of her socioeconomic circumstances. It offers no back story. This is a young woman with no partner, no family, little in the way of friendship, no hopes and, shockingly for an American film, no dreams, either for herself or Moonee. There is just the present with its infinite setbacks and urgent problems.

Some of this is obscured by Brooklynn Prince’s winsome Moonee; her irrepressible vitality is a shield. If there is any saving grace is the film is careful not to exploit her vulnerability and innocence. With so few reprieves, I can’t tell you how grateful and relieved I was for this crucial artistic decision. This is a difficult film but it's also hard to watch.

How I learned to stop worrying and learned to enjoy having my photo taken

sweetpolka shoot  #1. Me, a bit terrified but surprised to be having fun. The auspicious outfit. Photo: Emma Byrnes.

Demonstrating connectedness for banking not-for-profit Community 21. Photo: Emma Byrnes.

Hand model for Tea & Sympathy. Photo: Emma Byrnes.

sweetpolka shoot #2.  Looking serious but actually feeling more relaxed this time round. Photo: Emma Byrnes.

When I’m working with clients who are business owners I counsel them that if they can tolerate it, they should be prepared to be the face of their “brand” to some degree (working within the parameters of their temperament, sure). Given that most are passionate about their work and motivated by a deep sense of conviction talking about their business is a tap easier to turn on than off. Enthusiasm peaks just before I mention having photos taken. At that point it doesn’t so much as taper off as plunge.

Which I totally get. There was a time that just thinking about having my photo taken would bring me to sweat. Someone would hold up a camera to my face and the level of threat that I’d register was somewhere in the vicinity of a hand gun.

But a few years ago taking my freelance business to the next level I had to document my folio, a task that I approached with palpable dread. Designers are often their own worse clients. Just dragging my work out caused me actual physical pain. (I can’t break that down in 50 words or less but I think it has partly to do with my relationship with process and also a fear of judgement).

And while photographer Emma Byrnes and I had a long friendship to draw on, this was the first time we’d worked together. We didn’t really have a language for collaboration, no points on the board, though I sensed she was the right person for the job: intuitive, sensitive, and with a camera in her hand part psychologist, part animal trainer.

I thought we were going to lay the work flat and Emma would take a photo. Shoot. Repeat. But that’s not how it panned out. Firstly, Emma took a shine to my outfit. She thought I should appear in shot with my work, a surprising suggestion; the portfolio genre is disembodied, not counting the occasional hand holding book pages flat. But the idea will give you an insight into Emma’s approach, feeling her way through a given situation with openness and curiosity.

I had not bothered with my hair or worried with the makeup bag that morning. The lack of preparedness crossed my mind. But I placed trust in my photographer. I became a willing participant. Emma’s attitude was contagious. Before long I experienced a sensation I only reliably associate with writing and sometimes designing – when it’s going well, that is – a satisfying absorption and state of unselfconscious flow.

I know, “What the heck?”, right?

Since this shoot I’ve found myself moonlighting as a middle-aged model – no one is more surprised that myself by this turn of events – moving from behind the camera art directing shoots for clients and in front of it.

I have become a moving human prop for my photographer collaborator: the blurred person adding scale and texture to the photo for a small, seaside makers market, a hand model for a tea brand, a figure moving around oversized puzzle pieces for a community banking not-for-profit.

It turns out I really enjoy making images. I like it a lot. Here’s what I’ve learnt:

Taking photos takes time
Sure, it will be over more quickly if you rush it but capturing a good image takes time.

Be prepared
Think about the shots you want to get ahead of time. Be guided by how you intend to use them.

Tone
Go for tone over expression. Humans are too inconsistent to give good face. The tone of a series of photos is more memorable.

The “decisive” moment
In regards to portraiture, the idea that a photographer can capture some essential aspect of her subject – authentic, unguarded – might be true but is it helpful to the subject? I don’t think so. The thought is more terrifying than appealing.

Approach it like a performer
Like most stressful situations, it’s useful to assume a persona.

Experiment
Show a willingness to try different things. Often an on-the-spot solution to a particular problem will emerge.

Attention to detail
Give your props and setting plenty of thought beforehand but be flexible on the day.

Expectations
As in, have reasonable expectations. More than likely you will still look like yourself. I never expect more than six good shots out of a four hour shoot all going well. Some set ups will bear no fruit. It’s no big deal.

Ageing
Even my celebrity friends are getting older. It’s okay. We’re all growing old.

Of course, this whole about face has prompted to ask: what else am I hating that I could be loving?

The Gold Rush

I think most of us accept – embrace even – branding, that branch of marketing concerned with differentiating goods and services in the market place. But how prepared are we to extend the logic of branding to actual human beings? 

Writing a professional development workshop a couple of weeks ago on the subject of 'branding and online marketing for artists' got me thinking about this issue.

Mostly I was faced with my own discomfort. While I admire the inventive way that the mega famous engage with their own 'brand' (crossing over to a place where they talk about themselves in the third person – Hi Taylor! Sorry you had to kill Taylor – or creating a multitude of personas like Beyonce aka Fierce just to manage the internal stressors and/or respond creatively to dealing with their own image dominating global popular culture) what does any of this have to do with those of us more ordinary? I'm talking about regular creative peeps, those still doing their own shopping and most of their own chores.

But with my tween headed to 'VidCon' conference this weekend where teenagers will be signing up for sessions with the titles along the lines of  'Building Your Brand: Growing Your Audience' moderated by those in their early twenties I realise those reared in the age of social media consider this kind of thinking old hat, even obstructive.

What is the promise? What is the opportunity? Manage your online and social media presence well and you will get noticed. With a bit of patience and hunger you can monetize that attention. No study required. 

Sure, it's designed to do your nut in. Capitalism as it intersects with online culture is a confusing landscape, to be sure. Community and competition are difficult to distinguish. Same goes for authenticity and a carefully crafted self presentation. Freedom and enslavement, ditto.  

A digital detox is out of the question – social media is a garden that needs constant tending – but if things go pear shaped by all means get some fresh air. I find a podcast can get me over a hump. Just don't leave it too long, ok?

20th Century Women

Though I've long been obsessed with American culture of the late 1970s and the very early 1980s – in terms of cinematic mis-en-scene, particularly costume and production design – I've never seen a film that addressed it directly. Mike Mills' new indie feature, 20th Century Women is set in Santa Barbara, California in 1979. Mills takes this historical moment and unpacks it with loving attention to the behaviours, attitudes, politics and cultural markers of the time.

While the film ostensibly tells the story of a single mother Dorothea Fields (a glorious, radiant, wry chain-smoking Annette Benning) and her teenage son Jamie (Lucas Jade Zumann) as they negotiate his growing independence, it's also a loose portrait of women in his life – these are the 20th century women of the title – his childhood crush and object of affection (Elle Fanning) and their housemate, a twenty-something budding artist going through a personal crisis (Greta Gerwig) weathering it in the safety of their rambling mansion, a grand old building being restored by a middle-aged hippy mechanic (Billy Crudup).  

Overlook the slightly contrived set up; it doesn't make much sense. Mills is not a director all that interested in plot but what it lacks in narrative momentum or sense of urgency it more than compensates with a loose, open-ended energy and a commitment to exploring age, especially middle age, and the internal and external forces that shape us. He has an eye for dramatic images – a car sitting in a parking lot in flames, Jamie elegantly and perilously skateboarding down steep Santa Barbara boulevards – that render the ordinary poetic. 

Teenage Jamie likes to repeat that Dorothea was born in the Depression, a shorthand way of describing their difference in age as well the changed world he is coming of age in. When the motley crew sit down to watch President Jimmy Carter's speech on the 'Crisis of Confidence' about the rise of materialism in America Dorothea is the only one who agrees with its sentiments. But in many other respects she's a woman of her time: taking wealth creation into her own hands with a stocks portfolio, a professional job, and, in one very funny scene, cutting a dinner party short when the conversation steered by the younger women veers towards the subject of menstruation. 

While Dorothea worries about the kind of man Jamie will grow to be, Jamie concerns himself with what he perceives as Dorothea's loneliness. But is she lonely? I wasn't so certain. Jamie's worry exposes the difficulty of their relationship, the mutual love and worry that underpins it. I loved 20th Century Women's tenderness and claim it makes for the importance of sharing the things that excite us –  music, books, ideas – while maintaining that the very things that shape us also set us apart. And then there are the shirts. In its loving homage to the late 1970s it rifles through the wardrobes from the era and pulls out not one or two but too many good shirts to mention. 

Community

School fair, 2017. 

The Dream State

Image: Sean Meilak, Purple and Orange Arrangement, oil on linen, 51 x 51 cm, image courtesy of the artist and Niagara Galleries, Melbourne. 

In Sean Meilak's recent body of work Europe and intergenerational bonds loom large. It’s in the family history, roots that reach from Malta to Italy and the city of Tripoli in Libya.

Across the Mediterranean Sea in the city of Bologna the painter Giorgio Morandi sits in his studio arranging vases, bowls, cups, candleholders into intriguing and affecting tableaux’s, putting paintbrush to canvas. His still life paintings – modest, metaphysical works filled with quiet intensity – emerge from this soil.

Post war, emigration, from the Old World to the New.

Italy, 2013. The ruins. The ruins started something. The Forum, once the centre of Roman public life, a place where civic life unfolded, now a collection of architectural pieces, fragments sitting in the earth. In their midst, a reckoning with mortality. What do they recall? The chalkiness of bones. And the bones? The chalkiness of plaster. From the ruins, but possibly from elsewhere – who knows? – emerge architectural fantasies like metaphysical dreams. They return as fragments: elegant arches, columns tipped on their side like cogs, stairs.

The cast objects are many and varied. Their idiom – an austere formal language of rectilinear and curved shapes – is enlivened by a playful engagement with scale, the inclusion of found objects. A feather. Wire. Cork. The palette is soft: pinks, greys, sand, stone. Muted shades. These elegant assembled configurations invoke a kind of wonder. Is that the effect of the miniature, uncanniness, appeal to the unconscious, their invitation to play? 

Like dreams, they cast shadows. 

Pencil on paper. Drawings zero in on materials and render them in micro detail. Another iteration of scale. On the sheet, ripples, waves, lines, approximate a kinaesthetic energy. Movement in mono. 

Milan, 1981. Ettore Sottsass founds The Memphis Group, a design and architecture collective, that releases colourful, decorative, playful objects: furniture, fabrics, ceramics, glass and metal that alludes to previous design and art movements, the Antiquities, the Bauhaus. Some write it off as pastiche.  

The paintings. In them elegant formal investigations have come into contact with the detritus of life. The mundane and the precious assume a similar importance: a cylindrical cardboard roll wedged against marble. A crumpled plastic bag resting on a plinth.

What lessons are there in the cinema, in Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964) and Querelle (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1982)? Is it the way these films utilise mis-en-scene? Their scenographic mastery? Certainly they share an understanding in which the physical world is moulded to reflect the interior psychology of the performers. In Red Desert Guiliana (Monica Vitti) lies in her bedroom, its walls, floor, every object, every feature a gradation of pink. In Querelle the desperate protagonist stands in the desert. What has Antonioni done but painted the desert, literally painted the desert, a lurid colour. Oh, the emotion of artifice.

Circle back to the New World. A funeral. Father and son face one another, a casket between them, as it is lowered into the earth. What acknowledgement passes between them? A life. One life. Vitae.

– AZ

(This essay appears in Sean Meilak's catalogue for Marble Park)

Marble Park
Sean Meilak
31 January – 25 February 2017
Niagara Galleries
245 Punt Road Richmond VIC 3121

www.niagaragalleries.com.au

Our hearts that beat as one

I always undertake a period of reflection at this time of year. It's not exactly circled in the calendar, in fact it's largely an unconscious process. But I can roughly break it down into 'giving thanks' and 'getting sad', followed by a sense of gratitude. 

Giving Thanks. Picture me driving with the windows down handing out large Toblerone's and bottles of Moet to those on the fringes of my friendship circle that displayed generosity and kindness. This year it included a school mum with a home yoga studio who invited me to use the space as often as I liked and the excellent Nat Thomas, whose blog Natty Solo, a natural born investigator and agitator that has taken a blow torch to the gender inequities of artworld in true style.  

Just as I'm gearing up for Christmas Cheer and Getting Jolly, confusingly I find myself Getting Sad. This always takes me by surprise. I usually cotton on when I catch tears leaking down my face for no apparent reason. But this year there are reasons a-plenty to cry. The feature length film script that didn't make it into production -– only fourteen years of hopes and dreams in that 90 pages – now consigned to the metaphorical trash. And children who are properly unwell. 

This was a year when I stepped off the hamster wheel and into deep time or 'only being' in the parlance of wellness guru Elizabeth Lesser by way of Albert Einstein. Just being. There was no other way. 

It was a year in which I often felt isolated; bad times can be like that. Sharing problems felt like a risky proposition. For every friend who met my woes with an open heart there were just as many who looked at me with pity, glad that misfortune had not visited them. 

It was a year in which I became softer – and a year in which I toughened up. 

Once my tear ducts, the very ones that had put in touch with my feelings of disappointment and pain ran dry, I wandered into the living room where I found my man playing the bass guitar.

Thump, thump, thump. 

The sound was like a beating heart. My heart. His heart. Our hearts. 

Nocturnal Animals

Tom Ford’s second feature, the wonderfully named Nocturnal Animals, confirms him as a filmmaker interested in exploring interiority by paying close attention to the surface of things. Though I haven't revisited Ford's debut A Single Man since it screened seven years ago, I recall being struck by the beauty of its costumes (no surprise there), interiors and cinematography and Colin Firth's moving performance as a British widower in the grips of depression and suicidal ideation. The film's pedantic attention to mis-en-scene articulated not only a aesthetic sensitivity but also a compelling sense of interiority that deftly shifted between on the one hand a crushing melancholy and on the other, a kind of wonder.

In Nocturnal Animals, also an adaptation of a novel, Ford shifts his attention to a haunted American; in this film the tone is considerably darker. Amy Adams plays Susan Morrow, a successful but fragile gallery owner whose marriage to an emotionally unavailable alpha male is in difficulty. She receives a package in the mail from her first husband, the 'sensitive' Edward (Jake Gyllenhall), who Susan left in her mid-twenties because he could not fulfil her material ambitions. 

The arrival of the package, which contains a proof of his soon to be published novel, provokes a crisis in Susan. The film unfolds in noir fashion, as a film within a film, cutting between the present, the world of the novel and the past. 

The novel casts Susan and Edward as parents to a teenaged daughter on a road rip that ends in a run-in with a car load of hoons in the dead of night on stretch of lonely Texas road. I found viewing this sequence harrowing, not simply because it draws out the victimisation of its female characters but for the film's preoccupation with Edward's inability to protect his wife and daughter. In short, it calls into question his masculinity. When he is taunted by his adversary, he is called a vagina. The fictional scenario imagined by Edward is a masochistic reimagining of Susan's rejection of him. This is not a film in which anyone moves on, so to speak. Instead it seems to be in the thrall of the agony of loss, and where that leads. Nowhere healthy, is the short answer. Given the constraining ideas that the film exhibits in relation to gender – how it is felt, lived and performed by men and women – Nocturnal Animals makes an argument that the injured ego retreats to the symbolic. In its preoccupation of what it means to be a man, and by association a woman it feels strangely rigid and inflexible.  

At its most engaging Nocturnal Animals arranges the events of the novel, Susan's memories of the past and the demands of her present life to intersect in a fragmented reverie. But it's not without its oddities. Ford is a Romantic; he is very invested in Susan and Edward's first marriage and very hard on Susan for not believing more in Edward's promise. But is it cause for revenge? I had a hard time buying it. 

What Happens Now?

I spent each Saturday between the ages of 12 and 18 at the Vic Market. It was here that I discovered food pretty much, formed an idea of the person I might be when I grew up observing other shoppers while I waited with a second hand copy of a James Balwin novel in my hand, boxes of fruit and vegetables at my feet, for my parents to return with the car. 

For this very personal reason I'd been following the development of the City of Melbourne public art commission event, What Happens Now? closely.

In June the organisers were hosting a 10 day "lab" with the shortlisted 14 artists who had been whittled down from 150. The warehouse location at the edge of the Queen Victoria Market site was facilitated by a team spearheaded by Lab curator Natalie King, UK Public Art champion Claire Doherty and ideas man David Cross along with choreographer Gideon Obarzanek, historian Robyn Annear and artist Veronica Kent. This approach, designed to challenge existing approaches to commissioning public art, focused on engaging the artists in the stories, histories, materials and sounds of the Queen Victoria Market site by way of 'Triggers and Provocateurs'. If that sounds worrying, the artists I heard interviewed on RN's Books and Arts were surprisingly exhilarated. They obviously didn't mind having to dance for their supper.

Curators and arts bureaucrats like to talk about public art as 'activating' spaces, arguing that that artists and artwork contribute to creating new understandings and new ways of seeing. Those not familiar with the Vic Market might not appreciate how 'activated' it is by its everyday economic activity and exchange.  It is a vast sprawling collection of sheds, halls, stalls, stuff, smells and noise where produce, product and sellers exchange goods for money with the public. This is a place with a lot going on. Just ambling along, even without a shopping list, can be intense. What happens when you come across art in this context? I was curious to find out.

What Happens Now? largely features works by artists engaged in a practice that is participatory. Immediately this makes sense. Of course, it's a market.  

Hiromi Tango's textile work titled Wrapped that combines ideas about brain health and yarn into performance workshops that on the final day included musician Dylan Martorell and dancer Benjamin Hancock (on the day that I visited the work rested like a sleeping dragon on trestle tables), Isobel Knowles and Van Sowerwine's stop-motion animation screening amongst metal storage boxes while the artists recreate and sell market wares in miniature along side. And at Over Obelisk, a response to the John Batman monument by SIBLING, the duo have created a complex mobile hoarding that encases and frames the original monument in a variety of ways to 'reveal its contested histories'. 

I didn't get to everything. There was a wait for viewing and participating in the biennials most intriguing work, A Centre for Everything by Gabrielle de Vietri and Will Foster. This hands-on guided tour took the hand gestures and cultural codes used by stall holders to communicate with each other as its starting point. I was immediately drawn to the sight of drawings of hands pinned to a makeshift partition. It reminded me of the cartoon portraitists that plied their trade in the halls.

A bit tuckered out I passed Field Theory, a fruit box clad van broadcasting non-stop radio for 9000 minutes. No one was going home there. They were bunkered in for the duration of the biennial. Like kids on school camp they were pretty lively. By mimicking the colour and matching the noise level of its surroundings Field Theory worked on the principle of amplification. And it worked. I literally felt my mood lift.

Back in my car, I was glad to be out of the wind. I felt glad to have visited. I hadn't known it two hours earlier but quite possibly I was parked on an unmarked indigenous grave, a disturbing discovery thanks to Steven Rhall's subtle, formally complex work in M Shed. Why didn't I know that? It's easy to feel sceptical of the rhetoric of contemporary art and yet events like this can produce moments and insights like that. 

Image: Anna Zagala and Katrina Raymond viewing the sweet, sad Out In The Open by Isobel Knwles and Van Sowerwine. Photo by Bryony Jackson.

What Happens Now?
Public Art Melbourne Biennial Lab
17-23 October 2016
Queen Victoria Market