'Graphic Novels! Melbourne!' in Paris!

Back in January 2013, Daniel Hayward and I climbed aboard a big big aeroplane to begin a three-week European tour presenting our documentary feature film, Graphic Novels! Melbourne! in France, Germany and England. International man of mystery Bruce Woolley accompanied us as far as Dubai, where we bid him a fond farewell, but only for a week (more of him anon). Dan and I flew on to Paris.

So, it's been 20 years since I've been in Paris, and Dan had never been before, and it was magnifique. Our lovely friend Dominique lent us an empty apartment in the Rue de Reuilly, near the Gare de Lyon, to stay in for the few nights we were there.

That's me spending some quality time with my good mate Corto Maltese, created by the great Italian cartoonist Hugo Pratt (RIP).

On our first night we rendezvoused at Notre Dame cathedral with our Sydney friends, academics Adam and Alphia and their son Addison (that's Addison looking around Alphia's hair) and talked and ate and walked and talked.

The following morning, early (the streets dark and wet, the smell of the morning baguettes wafting deliciously out of the boulangeries) we rendezvoused at Charonne Metro with Melbourne artist friend Lily and her friend writer Maude and went and had coffee and croissants for our petit dejeuner.

Then returned to our digs, toasted our good luck and went back to bed.

After a snooze (ah, jet lag, you old fiend!), we visited Lily's exhibition in Belleville, and around the corner dropped into a bookshop and marvelled at the selection of comics, or rather BD (bande dessinees) on display. Like true colonials, however, we were most delighted to find Pat Grant's 'BLUE' in its French edition (published by Ankama) and 

some Mandy Ord in an edition of the anthology 'Turkey Comics' (published by The Hoochie Coochie - the French publisher of Gregory Mackay's 'Francis Bear' books too).

We spent a great evening with Gilbert Shelton, who took us to a brilliant tea shop/comic shop 'The-Troc', in the rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, run by his friend Ferid, who took this picture, and by that time, as you can see, things were getting beery...



NEXT: Angouleme

Last day 'At the Frontier' Friday 18 November 2011

My last morning at Room 418 at the Goodearth Hotel - I got up early (for me), cast a sad backwards glance at my light-flooded room, then jumped on Brian the bike. I cycled quite a ways towards Peppermint Grove - I got past Matilda Bay and the University of Western Australia and up a hill and looked back towards town

and realised, with a catch in my throat, that I wasn't going to be able to make my destination.  Not if I wanted to hear this guy

speak. And I did.  I really really did.  So I turned tail and rode back east along the north bank of the Swan and got to the Heath Ledger Theatre just in time to hear Ross Gibson in excellent form, speaking on 'Systems of Feeling':

How indeed. Art, according to Ross, taking his cue from other root words like 'articulation' and 'arthritis', is a joint, a place where a 'turn' occurs, a point at which some move on the part of the recipient/participant can take place, taking them from their received self to... something, somewhere, someone else. Perhaps museums can be organised, designed, articulated so that these halts can occur, these transformations can be given space.

He then used a bunch of lines from 'All Day Permanent Red' (2003, Faber and Faber) by the poet Christopher Logue, I think these lines:

     Drop into it.
Noise so clamourous it sucks.
You rush your pressed-flower hackles out
To the perimeter.
     And here it comes:
The unpremeditated joy as you
- The Uzi shuddering warm against your hip
Happy in danger in a dangerous place
Yourself another self you found at Troy -
Squeeze nickel through that rush of Greekoid scum!
Oh wonderful, most wonderful and then again more wonderful
a bond no word or lack of words can break,
Love above love!

(Which made me very happy, this book and Logue's 'War Music' being 2004 birthday presents from Mark Scillio and Bruce Woolley, back when we were reading The Iliad together)

The Logue shows the transformative experience - 'yourself another self you found at Troy' - and eloquently expresses its in-the-moment invulnerability to articulation - 'a bond no word or lack of words can break'.  Ross' question was, when the visitor/participant/audience returns from the sublime, 'What happens when the thinking starts again?'

What can be done for the turn from the aesthetic to the semantic?  How can it be supported, braced, held?

He gave us a lot more did Ross Gibson, and he left us with an image of Pablo Fernandes de Queiros, a Portuguese navigator who in 1606 went into a forest on a Pacific island and emerged transformed.

"What happened in that forest?"

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Also speaking on this last morning was Masaaki Morishita, author of 'The Empty Museum', speaking about the beginning of the cultural rescue operation that has been happening in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami of March of this year.

His talk was called 'Rescuing 'cultural properties, etcetera' after the tsumani in north-eastern Japan'.

I initially thought that the 'etcetera' was a bit unwieldy in that title but as Masaaki-san said:

In response to a question about the digitisation (that is, photographs and information about objects being recorded on-line) of the collections being rescued, his response was:

Another question was, 'how can we help?' and he seemed taken aback by that offer.  My hand is up.

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I needed to miss the mid-morning sessions, for the arrival in Perth of three very good reasons:

One

Two

And of course

So off we went to Alternating Currents at PICA, where the lads really enjoyed Taro Izumi's giant messy game.  Then they went off to find the first accommodation for our shared holiday, and I returned to the last afternoon of the conference.

In the last session, Frank Howarth mused on the possibility of

that is, a global one, with ICOM (the International Council of Museums) being one contender, and the AAM (the American Association of Museums) being the other.

And the last paper of the conference was very sobering - an account by Professor Peter Read of differing approaches taken in Chile to represent the years of terror under the Pinochet regime. The question being, how do representations help or hinder the process of reconciliation? He particularly looked at a location, 'Londres 38', where horrific torture and murder had taken place, and, post-Pinochet, the difference between the individual and state representations of what had occurred there.

He called for us to consider these complexities when faced with remembering and representing trauma in our local spaces, and reminded us of the message of the voiceless:

"Do not forget me."

This statement was relayed in this conference particularly strongly by Lily Hibberd (her focus is on prisoners and prisons), Andrea Witcomb, Maasaki Morishita, and Peter Read.  I salute them all.

Conference over, I sauntered off into the strong West Australian sun for the next adventure.

But that's another story.

'At the Frontier' day 1 - Tuesday 15 November 2011

So today was the first day of the Museums Australia/ Interpretation Australia joint conference, 'At the Frontier' - all 500 or so of us delegates set off to sea together in the very new Heath Ledger Theatre in the State Theatre Centre (opened in January of this year).

The conference was introduced, we were welcomed to country, the Western Australian Minister for Culture and the Arts declared the conference open, and then we heard from this guy, John Holden, about 'Next Generation Cultures' - it's anarchy, folks, in the UK!

Yes, apparently everyone is.  And museums need less to deliver to their audiences than to find their relationship to their audiences.  In fact 'audience' might not be the right word any more,  What about 'participants'?  This next generation want to: 1) enjoy 2) talk and 3) do, according to John's friend Charlie Leadbeater. So there's that.

Morning tea time! Let's head down the stairs running parallel to Roe Street, shall we?  Yes, lets!

Later in the day I attended a panel called 'Ancient', which was brilliant. Kevin Thiele, the head of the WA Herbarium, hails from 'the east' and is always putting his foot in it with his Perth colleagues with statements like

But he was a great speaker about the challenges faced by herbaria in terms of becoming more open to their audiences/participants.

And Ken Mulvaney

spoke passionately and brilliantly about the rock art petroglyphs on the islands of the Dampier Archipelago - he estimates that there are probably about one million pieces, which would make the archipelago the richest area of such art in the world.  And he eloquently painted a picture of the destruction of such art that happens when we allow development to occur pell-mell.

In the next session, I delivered a petcha kutcha presentation (20 slides, each shown for 20 seconds) about our theatre work at Melbourne Museum over the last 10 years and rather think I stuffed too much in. Ah well.  Also in that session was the wonderful Lily Hibberd, though, talking about her research and writing and artwork interrogating the use of solitary confinement and the persistence of the 'model prison' system in the treatment of prisoners, refugees and mentally ill people for 150 years.  It was chilling stuff, Jeremy Bentham's rotting head being used for a football notwithstanding.

At the end of the day I went to PICA to hear the curators of the exhibition 'Alternating Currents: Japanese art after March 2011' talk about the works on show.  Above, someone 'plays' Fujimoto Yukio's giant record made of charcoal - you walk on it and it crunches. Great.  Curator Hashimoto Azusa commented that Fujimoto-san has said that 'listening is a very creative act'.  I tend to agree.

Looking down from the first floor onto Izumi Taro's massive sugoroku board installation - it was described as a game without beginning or end.  We ended our tour at the 'Yellow Cake Street' cafe, devised by Nadegata Instant Party, which was the PICA bar remade as a...

cafe place to buy yellow cake (delicious) and beer.  I drank and ate and then cycled Brian back home, only realising that I'd overlooked dinner after a phone call to Susan - it's time for a late night visit to the 2 minute noodle shop, folks!  Ahh.  That's better.

Ready for bed and a sleep and a dream and then day #2.