Monday, May 20, 2024

Wight - Shunsen - Sander - Salle

Normana Wight
Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones
(series, Movies on Television)
ca. 1985
screenprint (postcard)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Normana Wight
R. Redford, All the President's Men
(series, Movies on Television)
ca. 1986
screenprint (postcard)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Normana Wight
William Hurt
(series, Movies on Television)
ca. 1986
screenprint (postcard)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Normana Wight
Self Portrait with Blue Hand
1986
screenprint (postcard)
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Natori Shunsen
Ichikawa Sumizo VI as Shirai Gonpachi
in The Floating World's Pattern

1926
color woodblock print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Natori Shunsen
Nakamura Ganjiro I as Sakata Tojuro
in Tojuro's Love

1925
color woodblock print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Natori Shunsen
Nakamura Kaisha I as Okaru in
Love Suicides, Eve of the Koshin Festival

1928
color woodblock print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

Natori Shunsen
Onoe Baiko VI as Sayuri
in Bridge of Return

1925
color woodblock print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

August Sander
The Architect Hans Poelzig, Berlin
1929
gelatin silver print
Art Institute of Chicago

August Sander
The Dadaist Raoul Hausmann
ca. 1930
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

August Sander
Gerd Arntz (painter)
1929
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

August Sander
Otto Freundlich (painter)
1929
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

David Salle
Low and Narrow
1994
lithograph, woodcut, etching and collage
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

David Salle
Long and High
1994
lithograph and woodcut
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

David Salle
High and Low
1994
lithograph, woodcut and screenprint
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

David Salle
Up and Down
1994
lithograph, woodcut, etching and collage
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra

from Music is International

     Orchestras have so long been speaking
This universal language that the Greek
     And the Barbarian have both mastered
Its enigmatic grammar which at last
     Says all things well. But who is worthy?
What is sweet? What is sound? Much of the earth
     Is austere, her temperate regions
Swarming with cops and robbers; germs besiege
     The walled towns and among the living
The captured outnumber the fugitive.
     Where silence is coldest and darkest,
Among those staring blemishes that mark
     War's havocking slot, it is easy
To guess what dreams such vaulting cries release:
     The unamerican survivor
Hears angels drinking fruit-juice with their wives
     Or making money in an open 
Unpoliced air. But what is our hope,
     As with an ostentatious rightness
These gratuitous sounds like water and light
     Bless the Republic? Do they sponsor
In us the mornes and motted mammelons,
     The sharp streams and sortering springs of 
A commuter's wish, where each frescade rings
     With melodious booing and hooing
As some elegant lovejoy deigns to woo
     And nothing dreadful ever happened?
Probably yes. We are easy to trap,
     Being Adam's children, as thirsty
For mere illusion still as when the first
     Comfortable heresy crooned to
The proud flesh founded on the self-made wound,
     And what we find rousing or touching
Tells us little and confuses us much.
     As Shaw said – Music is the brandy
Of the damned. It was from the good old grand
     Composers the progressive kind of 
Tyrant learned how to melt the legal mind
     With a visceral A-ha; fill a
Dwarf's ears with sforzandos and the dwarf will
     Believe he's a giant; the orchestral
Metaphor bamboozles the most oppressed
     – As a trombone the clerk will bravely
Go oompah-oompah to his minor grave –.
     So that to-day one recognises
The Machiavel by the hair in his eyes,
     His conductor's hands. Yet the jussive
Elohim are here too, asking for us
     Through the noise. 

– W.H. Auden (1947)