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Posts Tagged 'Stolen Generations
Review: 'Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy' at Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA), Melbourne
Categories: Australian artist, Australian photography, Australian writing, beauty, colour photography, cultural commentator, digital photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, intimacy, landscape, light, Melbourne, memory, photographic series, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, sculpture, space, time, video and works on paper
Tags: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art, Aboriginal art, Aboriginal Australians, Aboriginal culture, Aboriginal rights, Ancient bloom, anti-portraits, art + soul, Augustus Pitt Rivers, aura, aural, Australian art, Australian artist, Australian flag, Australian flora, Australian Graffiti, Australian Indigenous artist, Australian landscape, Australian performance art, Bidjara, Bidjara contemporary artist, Bidjara language, Bidjara ritual, Black gum 1, Black Gum 2, Black gum 3, British and Australian culture, British Empire, Charlie Perkins, charlotte day, Christian Thompson, Christian Thompson Ancient bloom, Christian Thompson Ariel, Christian Thompson Australian Graffiti, Christian Thompson Berceuse, Christian Thompson Black gum 1, Christian Thompson Black Gum 2, Christian Thompson Black gum 3, Christian Thompson Brother, Christian Thompson Dead tongue, Christian Thompson Desert slippers, Christian Thompson Dhagunyilangu, Christian Thompson Down Under World, Christian Thompson Ellipse, Christian Thompson Energy Matter, Christian Thompson Equilibrium, Christian Thompson Forgiveness of Land, Christian Thompson Hannah's Diary, Christian Thompson Heat, Christian Thompson Imperial relic, Christian Thompson King Billy, Christian Thompson Lamenting the flowers, Christian Thompson Lost Together, Christian Thompson Museum of Others, Christian Thompson Polari, Christian Thompson Refuge, Christian Thompson Ship of dreams, Christian Thompson Siren, Christian Thompson Trinity II, Christian Thompson Trinity III, Christian Thompson Untitled #6, Christian Thompson Untitled (banksia), Christian Thompson Untitled (blue gum), Christian Thompson We bury our own, Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy, conceptual anti-portraits, contemporary artist, Country, cryptic slang, Dead as a door nail, Dead tongue, dead white males, Desert slippers, Dhagunyilangu, Down Under World, Ellipse, Energy Matter, ethnic other, Fanny Cochran Smith, Forgiveness of Land, gender, Hannah's Diary, Hetti Perkins, homosexuality in the United Kingdom, I'm not going anywhere without you, identity, Imperial relic, Indigenous art, Indigenous artist, Indigenous language, indigenous people, Isabella kept her dignity, James Cook, John Ruskin, King Billy, Lamenting the flowers, language, Little Children are Sacred, Lost Together, masculinity, memory, Monash University Museum of Art, MUMA, Museum of Others, Northern Territory Emergency Response, othering, Othering the Anthropologist Walter Baldwin Spencer, Othering the Ethnologist Augustus Pitt Rivers, Othering the Explorer James Cook, personas, photographing aura, Pitt Rivers Museum, Polari, RAAF flag, race, red ensign, Refuge, ritual, Ritual Intimacy, Sexual Offences Act, sexuality, Ship of dreams, Slade Professor of Fine Art, spiritual repatriation, Stolen Generations, Tasmanian Aboriginal languages, the intervention, University of Oxford, video, Walter Baldwin Spencer, We bury our own
Exhibition dates: 27th April – 8th July 2017
This project has been supported by the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria
PLEASE NOTE: I am still recovering from my hand operation which is going to take longer than expected. All of the text has been constructed using a dictation programme and corrected using only my right hand – a tedious process. I have to keep my mental faculties together, otherwise this hand will drive me to distraction… Marcus
Christian Thompson
Black gum 1-3
From the series Australian graffiti
C-type prints
Collection of the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
Photo: Andrew Curtis
Black gum 1
"While I'm interested in portraiture – I don't consider my work as portraiture because that suggests that I'm trying to portray myself, my own visage, my own image. I employ images, icons, materials, metaphors to capture and idea and moment in time. There are many different things at play; taking a picture of myself is really the last thing that's on my mind."
Christian Thompson in conversation with Hetti Perkins, catalogue extract
"I'm interested in simple aesthetic gestures that can say something … something quite profound about the world that we live in. I tend to build images how I create a sculpture. I borrow from the world around me."
On being away from home: "You're able to remove yourself from the local discourse, and romanticise home. When you're displaced you tend to gravitate towards certain memories … But this is who I am. It would be weird not to express that somehow. I combine memories of my past with my lived experience and an idea of where I'd like to be … it's all montaged into one."
"But Thompson makes things up. His 'We bury our own' does not let us see the early daguerreotype but improvises a series of fugues on its spiritual essence. This is the crucial step that Thompson has taken: if you repeat the spectacle you cannot escape the past. But if you, a spiritual descendant, transmogrify yourself in keeping with the aura of the image's subject, during the prolonged period of encounter and immersion, you can 'repatriate' that forebear. Or so he desires."
"Through these conjurings of the language his people spoke before colonisation set out to strip them of their culture as well as their land, Christian Thompson performs private ceremonies – to reach beyond visual statements of personal presence and reawaken the knowledge of his forebears, and allow us, his listeners and viewers, into their living story."
Marina Warner. "Magical Aesthetics," extracts from the catalogue essay
Still singing, still Dreaming,
still loving… not dying.
This is a strong survey exhibition of the work of contemporary Australian Indigenous artist and Bidjara man exploring the world, Christian Thompson. As with any survey exhibition, it can only give us a glimpse into the long standing development of the artist's work, inviting the viewer to then research more fully the themes, conceptual acts and bodies (of work) that have led the artist to this point in his artistic development. Having said that the exhibition, together with its insightful catalogue essays and additional images that do not appear in the exhibition, allow the viewer to be challenged intellectually, aesthetically and most importantly … spiritually. And to be somewhat conflicted by the art as well, it has to be said.
Thompson's "multidisciplinary practice explores notions of cultural hybridity, along with identity and history, creating works that transcend cultural boundaries." His self-reflexive and self-referential bodies of work, often with the artist using his body as an "armature for his characters, costumes and various props," are intuitive and imaginative in how they relate Aboriginal and Australian/European history, taking past time into present time which influences future time. Time, memory, history, space, landscape are conflated into one point, enunciated through acts of ritual intimacy. These ritual intimacies, these performative acts, are enabled through an understanding of a regularised and constrained repetition of norms (in this case, the declarative power of colonialism), where the taking of a photograph of an Aboriginal person (for example), is "a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production…" (Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 95).
What is so heartening to see in this exhibition is a contemporary Indigenous artist not relying on re-animating colonial images of past injustices, but re-imagining these images to produce a spiritual connection to Country, to place, to people in the present moment. As Charlotte Day, Director, MUMA and Hetti Perkins, guest curator observe in the wall text at the beginning of the exhibition, "Rather than appropriating or restaging problematic ethnographic images of indigenous ancestors held in the Museum's photographic collection, Thompson has chosen to spend significant periods of time with these images, absorbing their 'aura' and developing a personal artistic and deferential response that is decisively empowered." As Marina Warner states in her excellent catalogue essay "Magical Aesthetics", these ritual intimacies are a "magical re-animation and adopt time-honoured processes of making holy – of hallowing. Adornment is central to ritual and a prime way of glorifying and consecration." What Thompson is doing is not quoting but translating the source-text into new material. As Mary Jacobus notes of the work of the painter Cy Twombly, "Quotation involves the repurposing of an existing text: translation requires a swerve from the source-text as it finds new directions and enters unknown terrain." (Mary Jacobus. Reading Cy Twombly: Poetry in Paint. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016, p. 7).
This auto-ethnographic exploration and adornment leads to a deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation of time in a heterotopic space, juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites of contestation – Thompson's travels and research from around the world, the embodiment in his own culture and that of contemporary Australia, pop culture, fashion, music and language – where, as Hetti Perkins says, "the unknowable is a lovely thing" and where Thompson can affect and influence "the Zeitgeist through more subversive means." These spaces of ritualised production overlaid with memory, imagination, desire, and nostalgia, these fragmented images, become a process and a performance in which Thompson seeks to ameliorate the objects aura through a process of 'spiritual repatriation'. Thompson's performativity is where the ritual of production and meaning is never fully predetermined at any stage of production and reception.
Here, in terms of 'aura' and 'spirit', I am interested in the word "repatriation". Repatriation means to send (someone) back to their own country – from the verb repatriare, from re- 'back' + Latin patria 'native land'. It has an etymological link to the word "patriot" – from late Latin patriota 'fellow countryman', from Greek patriōtēs, from patrios 'of one's fathers', from patris 'fatherland' – and all the imperial connotations that are associated with the word. So, to send someone back (against their own will? by force?) or to be patriotic, as belonging to or coming from, the fatherland. A land that is father, farther away. Therefore, it is with regard to a centralised, monolithic body and its materialities (for the body is usually centrally placed in Thompson's work) in Thompson's instinctive works, that relations of discourse and power will always produce hierarchies and overlappings which are going to be contested. As Judith Butler notes,
"That each of those categories [body and materiality] have a history and a historicity, that each of them is constituted through the boundary lines that distinguish them and, hence, by what they exclude, that relations of discourse and power produce hierarchies and overlappings among them and challenge those boundaries, implies that these are both persistent and contested regions." (Judith Butler. Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge, 1993, pp. 66-67)
Thus performativity is the power of discourse, the politicisation of abjection, and the ritual of being.
This is where I become conflicted by much of this work. Intellectually and conceptually I fully understand the instinctive, intuitive elements behind the work (crystals, flowers, maps, butterflies, dreams) but aesthetically I feel little 'aura' emanating from the photographs. Thompson's "peripatetic life and your bowerbird, magpie-like fascination" (p. 107) lead to all sorts of influences emerging in the work – orange from The Netherlands, Morris dancers from England, Jewish heritage, Aboriginal and Australian heritage, fashion, pop culture, music, language – all evidenced through "acts of concealment in his self-portraits." (p. 75). Now there's the rub!
In Thompson's ritual intimacies the intimacy is performed only once, for the camera. It is not didactic, but it is interior and hidden, leaving much to the feelings of the viewer, looking. The re-presentation of that intimacy is performed by the viewer every time they look at the art. I think of the work of one of my favourite performance artists, Claude Cahun, where the artist inhabits her personas, adorning her androgynous face with costume after costume to become something that she wants to become – a buddha, a double, a harpy, a lunatic or a doll with equal ease. Cahun is always and emphatically herself, undermining a certain authority… and she produces indelible images that sear the mind.
I don't get that from Thompson. I don't know who he really is. Does it matter? Yes it does. In supposedly his most autobiographic work (according to Hetti Perkins), the video Heat (2010, below) the work emerges out of Thompson's memories of growing up in the desert surrounding Barcaldine in central west Queensland where "heat captures the sensation that he associates with being on his country: the dry wind blowing through his hair." Perhaps for him or someone from the desert country like Hetti Perkins (as she states in the catalogue), but not for me. I feel no 'heat' from these three beautiful woman standing in a contextless background with a wind machine blowing their hair. The only 'heat' I felt was perhaps the metaphoric heat of colonisation, violence and abuse thrust on a vulnerable culture.
Talking of vulnerable cultures, in the work Polari (2014, below) Thompson invokes the history of languages in an intimate ritual "as he seeks to reanimate and repossess vanishing knowledge. Polari is a private language … a kind of code used by sailors, circus and fairground folk, and in gay circles. … Thompson's Polari series warns us that the artist has a language of his own, which we can overhear but not fully understand: something is withheld, in contrast to the imposed and implacable exposure which the subjects of scientific collections were made to suffer in the past." (Warner, p. 74) But why is he using Polari specifically, a language that is strongly associated with the libertine gay culture of the 1950s-70s? Does he have a right to use this word and its linguistic heritage because he is gay? It is never stated, again another thing left hidden, concealed and unresolved.
Although no culture can ever fully own its language (language is a construct after all) … if Thompson is not gay, then I would take exception to his invoking the Polari language, just as an Indigenous artist would take exception to me using Bidjara language in an art work of my own. I remember coming out in London in 1975 and speaking Polari myself when it was still being used in pubs and clubs such as the A + B club in Soho. It was not being used as a language of resistance, far from it, but as a language of desire. It was a language used to inculcate that desire. As a video on YouTube observes of speaking Polari, "you didn't think, oh God I'm so oppressed I can never speak about myself, you just did it, you just slipped into it without thinking." It was your own language, like a comfortable pair of slippers. Does Thompson understand how using that word to title a body of work could be as offensive to some people as he finds the denaturing of his own culture? For me this is where the work really becomes problematic, when an artist does not enunciate these connections, where things, like sexuality, remain hidden. Similarly, with historical photographs of Indigenous people taken for ethnographic study, Thompson fails to acknowledge the work of academics such as Jane Lydon and her important books Eye Contact: Photographing Indigenous Australians (2005) and Photography, Humanitarianism, Empire (2016) where she unpacks the historical baggage of the images and notes that the photographs were not solely a tool of colonial exploitation. Lydon articulates an understanding in Eye Contact that the residents of Coranderrk, an Aboriginal settlement near Healsville, Melbourne, "had a sophisticated understanding of how they were portrayed, and they became adept at manipulating their representations." Again, there is more than meets the eye, more than just 'spiritual repatriation' of aura.
For me, the magic of this exhibition arrives when Thompson lets go all obfuscation, let's go all actions that make something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible. Where his ritual intimacies become grounded in language, earth and spirit. This happens in the video works, Desert slippers (2006, below), Refuge (2014, below), Gamu Mambu (Blood Song) (2011) and Dhagunyilangu (Brother) (2011, below). In these videos, the Other's gaze disintegrates and we are left with poignant, heart felt words and actions that engage history, emotion, family and Country.
The video Desert slippers "features a Bidjara ritual in which a father and son transfer sweat. The desert slipper is a native cactus that symbolises the transferal of the spirit back to earth as the plant grows." It is simple, eloquent, powerful, present. The other videos feature two baroque singers from Europe and Thompson singing in his native tongue Bidjara (Bidyara, Pitjara), a language that Wikipedia states "is an extinct Australian Aboriginal language. In 1980 it was spoken by twenty elders in Queensland, between Tambo and Augathella, Warrego and Langlo rivers." Spelt out in black and white. Extinct. To hear Thompson sing a berceuse (French, from bercer 'to rock'), or lullaby in his native language, a language taught to him by his father, is the most emotional of experiences. The work "combines evocative chanting and electronic elements to invoke the cultural experiences and narratives of his Bidjara culture," and "is premised on the notion that if one word of Bidjara is spoken, or sung in this case, it remains a living language." Amen to that.
This is the real hallowing, not the dress ups or the concealments. It is in these videos that the raw material of his and his cultures experience is transmuted into living, breathing stories, in an alchemical transmutation, a magical re-animation of past time into present and future time. My transfiguration into a more spiritual state was complete when listening in quiet contemplation. For I was given, if only for a very brief moment, access to the pain of our first peoples and a vision of hope for their future healing.
still loving… and certainly not dying.
Many thankx to MUMA for allowing me to publish the photographs and videos in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
"At the heart of my practice is a concern with aura: what it is, how it can be photographed and how it can be repatriated."
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017
From the series King Billy
Image courtesy of the artist, Sarah Scout Presents, Melbourne, and Michael Reid, Sydney and Berlin
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring stills from the video Berceuse (2017)
Berceuse (extract installation view)
Three-channel digital colour video, sound
Sound design: Duane Morrison
In this newly commissioned work, Thompson sings a berceuse – a cradle song or lullaby – that combines evocative chanting and electronic elements to invoke the cultural experiences and narratives of his Bidjara culture. Intended as a gesture of re-imagining his traditional Bidjara language, which is been categorised as extinct, the work is premised on the notion that if one word of Bidjara is spoken, or sung in this case, it remains a living language.
Thompson makes subtle reference to his maternal Sephardic Jewish roots by ruminating in this work on the lullaby Nani Nani:
Lullaby, lullaby
The boy wants a lullaby,
The mother's son,
Who although small will grow.
Oh, oh my lady open,
Open the door,
I come home tired,
From ploughing the fields.
Oh, I won't open them,
You don't come home tired,
You've just come back,
From seeing your new lover.
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring the series Museum of Others (2016)
Installation view of Museum of Others (Othering the Ethnologist, Augustus Pitt Rivers) 2016
Museum of Others (Othering the Anthropologist, Walter Baldwin Spencer)
From the series Museum of Others
Installation view of Museum of Others (Othering the Explorer, James Cook) 2016
Museum of Others (Othering the Explorer, James Cook)
Museum of others is Thompson's most recent photographic series and continues to reflect on his time at the University of Oxford. It features several 'dead white males' from the pantheon of British and Australian culture. The explorer, the ethnologist and the anthropologist all had roles in the process of colonisation in Australia but the art critic is particular to Thompson; Ruskin was the first Slade Professor of Fine Art at University of Oxford, just as Thompson was one of its first Australian Aboriginal students. Thompson explains his motivation for the series:
"Historically, it was the western gaze that was projected onto the ethnic other and I thought I'll create a 'museum of others' and I'll be the one othering, so to speak. 'Equilibrium' is based around the idea that the vessel is the equaliser. The vessel is the cradle of all civilisations. We all have that in common."
Wall text from the exhibition
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring photographs from the series We bury our own 2010 (C-type prints)
We bury our own is a body of work that was developed in response to the historic collection of photography, featuring Aboriginal people from the late nineteenth century, at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Thompson noted in 2012 that these early images "have permeated my work over the last year. They have remained at the forefront of every artistic experiment and they have pushed me into new territory, they have travelled with me… I was drawn to elements of opulence, ritual, homage, fragility, melancholy, strength and even a sense of play operating in the photographs…"
Each of Thompson's lyrical photographic images from We bury our own and Pagan sun feature himself partially disguised with props and costumes. The works are virtually monochromatic with elements highlighted in full colour, and his eyes, or face, are partially concealed or painted. The use of votive objects is explained in his equally lyrical 2012 statement: "I lamented the passing of the flowers at the meadow, I lit candles and offered blood to the ancestral beings, looked into the black sparkling sea, donned the Oxford garb, visited the water by fire light and bowed at the knees of the old father ghost gum."
Text from the Turner Galleries website
Energy Matter
From the series We bury our own
Lamenting the flowers
Forgiveness of Land
Down Under World
"I conceived the We Bury Our Own series in 2010 after curator Christopher Morton invited me to develop a body of work that would be inspired by and in dialogue with the Australian photographic collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum…
The archival images have permeated my work over the last year. They have remained at the forefront of every artistic experiment and pushed me into new territory; they have travelled with me to residencies at the Fonderie Darling in Montreal and Greene Street Studio, New York. I was drawn to elements of opulence, ritual, homage, fragility, melancholy, strength and even a sense of play operating in the photographs. The simplicity of a monochrome and sepia palette, the frayed delicate edges and the cracks on the surface like a dry desert floor that reminded me of the salt plains of my own traditional lands.
I wanted to generate an aura around this series, a meditative space that was focused on freeing oneself of hurt, employing crystals and other votive objects that emit frequencies that can heal, ward off negative energies, psychic attack, geopathic stress and electro magnetic fields, and, importantly, transmit ideas.
I lamented the passing of the flowers at the meadow, I lit candles and offered blood to the ancestral beings, looked into the black sparkling sea, donned the Oxford garb, visited the water by fire light and bowed at the knees of the old father ghost gum. I asked the photographs in the Pitt Rivers Museum to be catalysts and waited patiently to see what ideas and images would surface in the work, I think with surprising results. Perhaps this is what art is able to do, perform a 'spiritual repatriation' rather than a physical one, fragment the historical narrative and traverse time and place to establish a new realm in the cosmos, set something free, allow it to embody the past and be intrinsically connected to the present?
I heard a story many years ago from some old men, they told me about a ceremony where young warriors would make incisions through the flesh exposing the joints, they would insert gems between the bones to emulate the creator spirits, often enduring infection and agonizing pain or resulting in death. The story has stuck with me for many years, one that suggests immense pain fused with intoxicating beauty. The idea of aspiring to embody the creators, to transgress the physical body by offering to our gods our spiritual heart, freeing ourselves of suffering by inducing a kind of excruciating decadent torture. This was something that played on my mind during the production of this series of photos and video work. The deliverance of the spirit back to land – the notion that art could be the vehicle for such a passage, the aspiration to occupy a space that belongs to something higher than one's physical self."
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring Ship of dreams, Ancient bloom, Death's second self, and Gods and kings from the series Imperial relic 2015 (C-type prints) and a still from the video dead tongue 2015
In Dead tongue Thompson continues to interrogate the implications of England's empirical quest on the former colonies of the British Empire through the threat to or loss of Indigenous languages. In works such as this, Thompson actively challenges the perception that Aboriginal culture has become reduced to a captured trophy of Empire.
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring Ship of dreams, Ancient bloom, Death's second self, and Gods and kings from the series Imperial relic 2015 (C-type prints)
In … Imperial relic, he continues to use himself as the 'armature for his characters, costumes and various props'. Drawing on his background in sculpture, he has created 'wearable sculptures' including a trumpet shaped shirt collar, an eruption of white flowers from a union jack hoodie, and an armature of maps. In each his face is partially or fully obscured again. "I'm interested in ideas of submission and domination," he says. "So the trumpet headpiece is beautiful, but it also potentially muffles or silences the voice. The same thing with maps: they are purporting different kinds of historical narrative, depending who is telling the story. One is about the history of Indigenous people, one is about the history of white colonisers and then one is about the idea of charting the land and of discovery. I'm wearing it as an armature over my own body: that's part of my own history but also of Australian history."
Ancient bloom
From the series Imperial relic
C-type print on fuji pearl metallic paper
Ship of dreams
The series title Imperial relic, summarises the fundamental philosophy underpinning the colonial occupation of Australia. Like the nearby series We bury our own, it is closely connected to Thompson's studies in the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum and shares with the Australian graffiti series Thomson's physical presence is standing in for the Australian landscape.
The work Ancient bloom alludes to the phonograph horn out which might be heard the voice of Fanny Cochran Smith, who's wax cylinder recordings of songs are the only historical audio recordings of any of the Tasmanian Aboriginal languages. Is also represents a Victorian-era shirt collar – a motif that has appeared in Thompson's work since his Emotional striptease series of 2003 – but here is exaggerated into a soft-sculptural form that both projects and stifles the voice.
In Death's second self the artist's face is uncovered but distorted by make up and digital postproduction effects.The title quotes William Shakespeare's Sonnet 73:
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In God and Kings Thompson is cloaked with a map of Aboriginal language groups like a coat of armour. In the Ship of dreams he reprises the motif of Australian flora obscuring his face but here his hoodie is stitched together from several flags: the red ensign (flown by British registered ships), the RAAF flag and the Australian flag.
"I'm interested in ideas of submission and domination … So the trumpet headpiece is beautiful, but it also potentially muffles or silences the voice. The same thing with maps: they are purporting different kinds of historical narrative, depending who is telling the story. One is about the history of Indigenous people, one is about the history of white colonisers and then one is about the idea of charting the land and of discovery. I'm wearing it as an armature over my own body: that's part of my own history but also of Australian history."
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring Isabella kept her dignity, I'm not going anywhere without you, Dead as a door nail and Hannah's diary from the series Lost together 2009 (C-type prints)
On 13 February 2008 then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made an official apology to Aboriginal Australians for the Stolen Generations – the children of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander descent who were removed from their families between 1910 and 1970 under the respective Federal and State government policies of assimilation. At the time, Thompson was preparing to leave Australia for further studies aboard and felt this historic gesture allowed him to proudly take his culture and history with him as he ventured into the world.
Thompson photographed the series Lost together in the Netherlands while studying at the DasArts Academy of Theatre and Dance at Amsterdam University. The theme of the orange throughout the series is a reference to the national colour of the Netherlands, while the tartan patterning refers to early clan societies in the United Kingdom. The combination of these different styles is based on counter-cultural aesthetics – particularly punk collage of 1970s London.
Hannah's Diary
From the series Lost Together
MUMA | Monash University Museum of Art is proud to announce the first major survey exhibition of the work of Bidjara artist, Christian Thompson, one of Australia's leading and most intriguing contemporary artists.
Thompson works across photography, video, sculpture, performance and sound, interweaving themes of identity, race and history with his lived experience. His work is held in the collections of major state and national art museums in Australia and internationally.
Thompson made history as one of the first two Aboriginal Australians to be accepted into the University of Oxford as a Charlie Perkins Scholar, where he completed his Doctorate of Philosophy (Fine Art) in 2016. Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy opens as the artist looks forward to the graduation ceremony in July, when he will be conferred his degree.
Featuring a major new commission created for this exhibition, Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy will survey Thompson's diverse practice, spanning fifteen years, and will also be accompanied by the publication of the first monograph on the artist's career and work, including essays by Brian Catling RA and Professor Dame Marina Warner DBE, CBE, FBA, FRSL.
The specially commissioned installation will be an ambitious multichannel composition, developing the sonic experimentation that is a signature of Thompson's work. Incorporating Bidjara language, it will invite viewers into an immersive space of wall-to-wall imagery and sound:
"Bidjara is officially an endangered language but my work is motivated by the simple yet profound idea that if even one word of an endangered language is spoken it continues to be a living language," Thompson says.
Christian Thompson: Ritual Intimacy explores the unique perspective and breadth of Thompson's practice from the fashioning of identity through to his ongoing interest in Indigenous language as the expression of cultural survival. The new multichannel work will develop musical ideas Thompson has previously explored.
"It will be a much more ambitious iteration of a song in Bidjara. At one stage I'm singing on one screen and then other versions of me appear singing the melodies. I really see it as an opportunity to do something that's more complex musically, more textured sonically – I also want it to be more intricate with my use of language," the artist says.
Ritual Intimacy is curated by MUMA director Charlotte Day and guest curator Hetti Perkins. Day explains that the exhibition is part of MUMA's Australian artist series, which affords the opportunity to look at each artist's practice in depth. "Christian's exhibition traces a particularly productive period of research and development, from early well-known works such as the Australian Graffiti series to more recent experiments with language in sound and song works," Day says.
A long-time curatorial collaborator with Thompson, Perkins is the writer and presenter of art + soul, the ABC's acclaimed television series about contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art. Thompson was accepted to Oxford University on an inaugural Charlie Perkins Scholarship, set up to honour Hetti Perkins's famous father – a leader, activist and the first Aboriginal Australian to graduate from university. Perkins says the MUMA exhibition is well-earned recognition for Thompson's work, which she featured in the second series of art + soul.
"Christian has spent periods of his adult life, as a practicing artist, away from home, but there is a common thread in his work, and it's this connection to home or Country," Perkins says. "In terms of the rituals or rites of the exhibition title, he is constantly reiterating that connection to home – through words, through performance, through his art, through ideas and writing," she says.
Alongside performance and ritual, Thompson's concept of "spiritual repatriation" is central to his work. Working with the Australian collection at famed ethnographic storehouse the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, the artist was offered copies of colonial photographs of Aboriginal people but preferred not to work this way. Instead, he chose to spend significant periods of time with these ancestral images, absorbing their "aura" in order to then make his own artistic response that did not reproduce those original problematic images.
Dr Christian Thompson is a Bidjara contemporary artist whose work explores notions of identity, cultural hybridity, and history; often referring to the relationships between these concepts and the environment. Formally trained as a sculptor, Thompson's multidisciplinary practice engages mediums such as photography, video, sculpture, performance, and sound. His work focuses on the exploration of identity, sexuality, gender, race, and memory. In his live performances and conceptual anti-portraits he inhabits a range of personas achieved through handcrafted sculptures and carefully orchestrated poses and backdrops.
Press release from MUMA
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring the series Polari (2014)
'Polari' is a form of cant or cryptic slang that evolved over several centuries from the various languages that converged in London's theatres, circuses and fairgrounds, the merchant navy and criminal circles. It came to be associated with gay subculture, as many gay men worked in theatrical entertainment or joined ocean liners as waiters, stewards and entertainers at a time when homosexual activity was illegal. This slang rendered the speaker unintelligible to hostile outsiders, such as policeman, but fell out of use after the Sexual Offences Act (1967) effectively decriminalised homosexuality in the United Kingdom. Attracted to the theatricality and defiant nature of Polari (which he likens to the situation of Australian Indigenous languages under assimilationist policies), Thompson borrowed its name for the series which examines how subcultures express themselves.
From the series Polari
Trinity II
Trinity III
Polari was a form of slang used by gay men in Britain prior to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, used primarily as a coded way for them to discuss their experiences. It quickly fell out of use in the 70s, although several words entered mainstream English and are still used today. For more about Polari see Wikipedia.
Author and academic Paul Baker of Lancaster University discusses a form of gay slang known as Polari that was spoken in Britain. It was a secret type of language used mainly by gay men and some lesbians and members of the trans, drag and other communities in the United Kingdom in the 20th century until it largely died out by the early 1970s.
Refuge is a video work by contemporary Australian artist Christian Thompson. Thompson sings in the endangered Bidjara language of his heritage. A collaboration with James Young formerly of 'Nico' and recorded the original track in Oxford, United Kingdom.
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring stills from the video Heat (2010)
Heat (extract)
Like the Australian graffiti photographs [see photographs below], Heat come out of Thompson's memories of growing up in the desert surrounding Barcaldine in central west Queensland. Barcaldine is famous for its role in the foundation organised labor in Queensland and ultimately the formation of the Australian Labor Party. It also holds historical significance for Thompson's family as it is where his great-great-grandfather, Charlie Thompson, surreptitiously bought a block of land before Aboriginal people could legally buy land, creating a safe haven for his family and other Aboriginal families at the time when Aboriginal people had few legal rights. For Thompson, heat captures the sensation that he associates with being on his country: the dry wind blowing through his hair. It features the three granddaughters of Aboriginal rights pioneer Charlie Perkins, who are the daughters of Thompson's Long time collaborator Hetti Perkins.
Christian Thompson: Ritual intimacy, installation view: Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne 2017 featuring photographs from the series Australian graffiti (2007)
Untitled (blue gum)
Untitled (banksia)
Monash University Collection
Australian graffiti was the last work that Thompson made before leaving Australia for Europe. It connects with his memories of growing up in the outback and its desert flowers, which he perceives to be both fragile and immensely powerful. I adorning himself with garlands of these flowers and flamboyant garments of the 1980s and 1990s – the period in which he grew up – Thompson juxtaposes these elements against his own Bidjara masculinity. By wearing native flora he also stands in for the landscape, invoking an Indigenous understanding of the landscape as a corporeal, living ancestral being.
Desert slippers
Single-channel digital colour video, sound
Desert slippers was made at the time the Northern Territory government commissioned research into allegations of the abuse of children in Aboriginal communities. When the 'Little Children are Sacred' report was tabled the following year, the federal government under John Howard staged the Northern Territory Emergency Response (NTER), which quickly became known as 'the intervention'. This action was enacted without consultation with Indigenous people and ignored the substantive recommendations of the report to which it was allegedly responding.
Thompson made this video, involving his father, and the ceremonial aspects of their daily lives, during this period. Desert slippers features a Bidjara ritual in which a father and son transfer sweat. The desert slipper is a native cactus that symbolises the transferal of the spirit back to earth as the plant grows.
Dhagunyilangu (Brother) (extract installation view)
Single-channel digital colour video, sound, subtitled
Dhagunyilangu (Brother)
Gamu Mambu (Blood Song) and Dhagunyilangu (Brother) were made in England and in the Netherlands respectively. While studying at the DasArts Academy of Theatre and Dance in Amsterdam, a centre for the study of early musical styles such as the baroque, Thompson realised that his own Bidjara language could be interpreted through the matrix of another cultural context and sphere. He undertook operatic training with this in mind, choosing in the end to work with specialist singers Sonja Gruys and Jeremy Vinogradov to realise the two works.
Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA)
Ground Floor, Building F,
Monash University Caulfield campus,
900 Dandenong Road,
Caulfield East, VIC 3145
T: 61 3 9905 4217
Tuesday – Friday 10am – 5pm
Saturday 12 – 5pm
Monash University Museum of Art (MUMA) website
Exhibition: 'Storm in a Teacup' at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, Mornington
Categories: Australian artist, Australian photography, beauty, black and white photography, colour photography, digital photography, documentary photography, exhibition, existence, gallery website, illustration, installation art, intimacy, landscape, light, memory, painting, photography, portrait, psychological, quotation, reality, sculpture, space, time and works on paper
Tags: Adam Hill, Adam Hill Not everyone's cup of tea, Afternoon tea at "Vivaleigh", Alice in Wonderland, Anne Zahalka, Anne Zahalka Saturday 5.18 pm 1995, Australia, Australia photography, Australian art, Australian artists, Australian colonial history, Australian colonialism, Australian Impressionism, Australian landscape, Australian racism, Blak Douglas, Blue (Bower-Bauer), Botany Bay, Briggs family tea service, Charles Blackman, Charles Blackman Feet beneath the table, Clare Humphries, Clare Humphries Family confection II, Clare Humphries Some things were out in the open, Dark tea, Dido Elizabeth Belle, Doll Mountgarret Briggs, E. Phillips Fox, E. Phillips Fox The arbour, enamelware, eX de Medici, eX de Medici Blue (Bower-Bauer), Exceed speed mislead concede, Family confection II, Feet beneath the table, George Briggs, Giuseppe Romeo, Giuseppe Romeo Subjective landscape, Global Warming, Group taking tea in a garden, heather shimmen, Heather Shimmen Tip me up, Hotham Street Ladies, Hotham Street Ladies Dark tea, James Fox Barnard, James Fox Barnard Lawn Arylie, James Fox Barnard Tea on verandah, Johann Zoffany, Joseph Banks' tea party, Julie Dowling, Julie Dowling White with one, Kate Bergin, Kate Bergin The hunt for a room of one's own, Kendal Murray, Kendal Murray Exceed speed mislead concede, kewpie dolls, Lawn Arylie Hobart, Let's forget about global warming, Lewis Caroll, Lewis Caroll Alice in Wonderland, Lord William Murray, Mad Hatter's tea party, Maldives, Maldives President Mohammed Nasheed, Mannalargenna, Mark James Daniel, Mark James Daniel Verandah "Harefield", Men drinking billy tea, Michael Cook, Michael Cook Object (table), Michael J Drew, Michael J Drew Group taking tea in a garden, Mohammed Nasheed, Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, Not everyone's cup of tea, Object (table), Of consequence rather than reason, Pairrebeenne people, Penny Byrne, Penny Byrne Let's forget about global warming, Penny Byrne Tea for two in Tuvalu, Porcelain wall - ode to an obsession, Rex Hazlewood, Rex Hazlewood Men drinking billy tea, Robyn Phelan, Robyn Phelan Porcelain wall, Room No. 14, Rosalie Gascoigne, Rosalie Gascoigne The tea party, Samantha Everton, Samantha Everton Camellia, Sarah Palin, Saturday 5.18 pm 1995, Sharon West, Sharon West Joseph Banks' tea party, Sharon West Two Koori Tribesmen, Sharon West Two Koori Tribesmen receive a gift of afternoon tea from local colonists, Some things were out in the open, Stolen Generations, Storm in a Teacup, Storm in a Teacup Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery, Subjective landscape, tea ceremony, tea drinking, Tea for two in Tuvalu, Tea on verandah, The arbour, The hunt for a room of one's own, The tea party, Tip me up, Trent Jansen, Trent Jansen Briggs family tea service, Tuvalu, Two Koori Tribesmen receive a gift of afternoon tea from local colonists, Verandah "Harefield", White with one, Woretermoeteyenner, Yenny Huber, Yenny Huber Room No. 14
Exhibition dates: 24th July – 27th September 2015
This is the best thematic group exhibition I have seen in Melbourne and surrounds this year.
Every piece in the exhibition is visually stimulating and intelligently constructed, all works combining to make an engaging exhibition. Nothing is superfluous, every work having something interesting to say, whether it is about the ceremony of tea drinking, colonisation, global warming, Stolen Generations or social mores. Congratulations must go to the curators and artists for their efforts.
Particular favourites where the Hotham Street Ladies Dark Tea (2015, below) made of royal icing, butter cream icing, fondant, food dye, and found objects; the many sculptural objects which form the backbone of the exhibition, especially the work of Sharon West and Penny Byrne; and the wonderful vintage photographs that are displayed in the foyer of the gallery.
Accompanying this exhibition is another excellent exhibition, Ways to draw: A selection from the permanent collection by Betty Churcher, on till 27th September as well. If you want a day out from Melbourne with lunch in Mornington, some seriously good art and a drive along the coast, you could do no better than visit the gallery in the next week. Highly recommended.
Many thankx to the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Hotham Street Ladies (est. Australia 2007)
Dark tea (installation photo)
Royal icing, butter cream icing, fondant, food dye, found objects
Dimensions variable
Dark tea (details)
Charles Blackman (b. Australia 1928)
Feet beneath the table
Tempera and oil on composition board
106.5 x 121.8 cm
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Presented through the NGV Foundation by Barbara Blackman, Honorary Life Benefactor, 2005
Charles Blackman first encountered Lewis Caroll's book, Alice in Wonderland, through a talking book for the blind which his wife, Barbara was listening to. Her developing blindness resulted in telescopic vision, spatial disorientation and a shrinking visual field. She was also pregnant with their first child and her distorted body image also had parallels with Alice's experiences. By painting Alice at the Mad Hatter's tea party Blackman could express his wife's feeling of bewilderment and disorientation.
E. Phillips Fox (b. Australia 1865; d. Victoria 1915)
The arbour
Felton Bequest 1916
Melbourne born E. Phillips Fox, described as 'one of the greatest of Australia's Impressionist painters and the most gifted of her colourists'1 went to Paris in 1887 to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts where he encountered the work of the French Impressionists. He remained in Paris for several years but made frequent trips back to Melbourne to visit his family. The Arbour was painted in Paris in Fox's garden but is based upon observations of family life in his brother's garden in Malvern. The depiction of an elegant family taking tea al fresco is a study of refined gentility. The Arbour was exhibited at both the Royal Academy and the Paris Salon exhibitions and was regarded by Fox as the finest thing he had done.2 At the time the painting was much admired for its 'subtle lights ad shadow'3 and his exemplary 'use of delicate colour and refined harmonies.'4
Courier Mail, 12 May 1949
Sydney Morning Herald, 13 October 1913
Le Courrier Australien, Sydney, 15 April 1949
Clare Humphries (b. Australia 1973)
Some things were out in the open
Pigment print on Hahnemühle photo rag paper (ed. 3/5)
Adam Hill (Blak Douglas) (b. Australia 1970)
Not everyone's cup of tea
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Purchased 2009
Kendal Murray (b. Australia 1958)
Exceed speed, mislead, concede
Mixed media assemblage
Courtesy of the artist and Arthouse Gallery, Sydney
Penny Byrne (b. Australia 1965)
Tea for two in Tuvalu
Vintage porcelain figurine, vintage, Action man accessories, vintage coral, glass fish, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments
Tea for two in Tuvalu (installation photo)
This piece was inspired by an underwater cabinet meeting held in 2009 by Maldives President Mohammed Nasheed in a campaign to raise awareness for activity on climate change. The thirty minute meeting was held six metres below sea level and was attended by eleven cabinet members calling upon all countries to cut their emissions to halt further temperature rises.
Polynesian island nation of Tuvalu, located in the Pacific Ocean midway between Hawaii and Australia, experienced a severe drought in 2011. A sate of emergency was declared and rationing of fresh-water took place which restricted households on some of the islands to two buckets of fresh water per day. Tuvalu is also especially susceptible to changes in sea level and it is estimated that a sea level rise of 20 to 40 centimetres in the next 100 years could make Tuvalu uninhabitable.
Kate Bergin (b. Australia 1968)
The hunt for a room of one's own
Oil on canvas on board
Kate Bergin draws upon Dutch and Flemish seventeenth century tradition of still life painting to comment on our attitudes to animals. Bergin stages the scene on a crumpled white tablecloth upon which a large fox, based on a taxidermy fox she bought on eBay, regally sits centre stage. Meticulously rendered native birds, including a honeyeater, finch and triller, are based on photographs of specimens from the Melbourne Museum Collection. They flit about unperturbed by the introduced predator. Teaspoons, representing the impulse for collecting, entangle the fox and bird. Together with a teapot and cup, precariously placed, they contribute to the overarching sense of impending chaos.
Both afternoon tea and the fox represent English upper class social mores and were introduced into the colonies following British settlemnet. The fox arrived in 1855, brought in for recreational hunting, and has been a major cause of native bird extinctions. Fox numbers are increasing in some areas further threatening the precarious balance between wild life and introduced species.
Sharon West (b. Australia 1963)
Two Koori Tribesmen receive a gift of afternoon tea from local colonists (installation photo)
Heather Shimmen (b. Australia 1957)
Tip me up (installation photo)
Linocut on paper and organza (ed. 7/30)
Courtesy of the artist and Australian Galleries, Melbourne and Sydney
Trent Jansen (b. Australia 1981)
Briggs family tea service (installation photo)
Slip cast porcelain, bull kelp, wallaby pelt, copper and brass
George (teapot) 22.5 x 20.5 x 13.0 cm; Woretermoeteyenner (sugar bowl) 16.0 x 13.5 x 9.0 cm; Dolly (milk jug) 12.5 x 12.5 x 8.5 cm; John (teacup) 7.0 x 8.5 x 8.0 cm; Eliza (teacup) 7.5 x 10.5 x 8.0 cm; Mary (teacup) 10.0 x 9.0 x 6.5 cm
Courtesy of Broached Commissions, Melbourne
The Briggs family tea service represents the marriage of George Briggs, a free settler, to Woretermoeteyenner of the Pairrebeenne people in Van Diemen's Land and the four children they had together. Briggs arrived from Bedfordshire in 1791 and learned to speak the language of the local Pairrebeenne people, trading tea, flour and sugar fro kangaroo, wallaby and seal skins. It is understood that he became good friends with the leader of the Pairrebeenne people, Mannalargenna, and by 1810 he partnered his daughter Woretermoeteyenner. Their marriage meant she had to adapt to a way of life that merged her traditional cultural values with the ways of British settlers. The teapot and sugar bowl represent the parents while their first daughter, Doll Mountgarret Briggs is symbolised in the milk jug and the three cups each signify their other children John, Eliza and Mary.
The tea service is a hybrid design bringing together materials common to both cultures. To realize the set Jansen worked with Rod Bamford on the ceramic elements, Oliver Smith for the brass and copper and Vicki West, who uses the traditional methods of her Tasmanian Aboriginal ancestors, worked with the bull kelp components.
eX de Medici (b. Australia 1959)
Blue (Bower-Bauer) (installation photo)
Watercolour over black pencil on paper
Blue (Bower-Bauer) (detail)
A turning point in eX de Medici's career came in 1998 when she saw an exhibition of watercolours by Ferdinand Bauer comprising 2,000 rarely seen images of native flora and fauna made when Bauer was official artist on Matthew Flinder's historic circumnavigation of Australia in 1801-03. Previously working with tattoo imagery, Medici found the intricate works so compelling she decided to change course and 'retrograde' herself and explore watercolour as a medium.1
Referencing Australia's Bower bird that adorns its nest with anything blue, Medici entangles the history of vanitas painting with commentary about the desire to seek permanence and affirmation in the accumulation of things. The broken willow pattern platter, upturned jugs and cups, amassed with so many other decorative and functional objects, are juxtaposed with skulls, fruit and flowers – symbols of mortality. A reaction to what she considered John Howard's regressive politics at the time, the work 'is a kind of a backhanded discussion about colonising our minds with retroactive ideas'.2
Ted Gott. 'eX deMedici an epic journey on a Lilliputian scale' Art and Australia Vol. 40, No. 1, Spring 2002, p. 105
eX deMedici in Paul Flynn. Artist Profile #5, March 2008, pp. 28-35.
Storm in a Teacup reflects upon tea drinking in Australia. Introduced by the British colonials, the afternoon tea party was an attempt to 'civilise' the land. Tea drinking became so popular in the colonies that by 1888 the amount of tea consumed per capita exceeded the amount consumed in England. Soon after, billy tea was to become an enduring symbol of the pioneering spirit, immortalised by Henry Lawson's stories published under the title While the billy boils.
Beginning with elegant paintings of the afternoon tea table from E. Phillips Fox and Arthur Streeton, the exhibition goes on to explore the darker side of tea drinking and the social and environmental impacts of the humble cup of tea. Michael Cook's Object (table), 2015, provides an alternative history to the narrative of colonialism while Sharon West and Adam Hill both use humour to subvert colonial understandings of the afternoon tea party as an occasion of refined gentility.
The humble cuppa has been around for thousands of years, but this exhibition explores how a popular beverage can impact on us culturally, socially, environmentally and politically. There is more to debate than just the proper way to make a cup of tea. Storm in a teacup explores far-reaching issues brewing from tea, including the imposition of one culture upon another – especially on the colonial frontier; the production of ceramics and the environmental impacts of porcelain and its production; gender stereotypes and socialisation through tea parties. The exhibition also reflects upon tea drinking ceremonies in Asia within a western Orientalist paradigm and tea drinking as an occasion for familial cohesiveness and disconnect."
Text from the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery
Mark James Daniel (1867-1949)
Verandah, "Harefield" – afternoon tea
Glass negative
8.5 x 11.0 cm. (quarter plate)
Collection of the State Library of Victoria
Michael J Drew (1873-1943)
Group taking tea in a garden
12.2 x 16.5 cm. (half plate)
Rex Hazlewood (1886-1968)
[Men drinking billy tea]
Silver gelatin print
Collection of the State Library of New South Wales
Anonymous photographer
Afternoon tea at "Vivaleigh"
James Fox Barnard (1874-1945)
Lawn, Arylie, Hobart
[Tea on the verandah]
8.5 x 11.0 cm (quarter plate)
Installation photograph of the exhibition Storm in a Teacup at the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery
"Tea is the medium of many a complex and commonplace rituals. Adopted in a variety of ceremonies and customs across the globe, its unique and symbolic place in our lives is subtle and powerful. Whether a quick cuppa around the kitchen table or a lavish display of refined gentility; from billy tea to Asian tea-drinking ceremonies, tea has played an important role in international trade but more curiously in facilitating social cohesiveness.
Comprising approximately 50 works including painting, photography, sculpture and installation Storm in a Teacup features artists such as Chares Blackman, John Perceval, Emma Minnie Boyd, E. Phillips Fox and contemporary artists Stephen Bowers, Danie Mellor, Penny Byrne, Rosalie Gasgoigne, Matthew Sleeth, eX de Medici, Anne Zahalka, Polixeni Papapetrou and a mad teaparty installation by Hotham Street Ladies.
Tea is said to have first been invented in China around 2700 BC, with the earliest records of tea consumption dating to 1000BC. Initially consumed as a medicinal drink, it became widely popular as a common beverage and traded across Asia and Europe during the 16th century. It was King Charles II's wife Catherine of Portugal who is said to have brought the tea habit to Great Britain. Indeed, the afternoon tea party first became fashionable in the seventeenth century following Queen Catherine de Braganza's fondness for serving the beverage at Whitehall in London. It wasn't until the 18th century that it became widely consumed with tea smuggling bringing the tipple to the masses and later influenced the Boston Tea Party.
Tea drinking became a demonstration of social aspirations and grew in popularity giving rise to a subtle orchestration of manners, dress and serving paraphernalia which created new forms of commodity consumption. In the colonies of New South Wales and Victoria afternoon tea parties were a lavish display of settler understandings of refined gentility that were an attempt to signal allegiance to the values of the home country and ground the displaced community in their originating culture. In this respect the afternoon tea party expressed collective understandings of British identity and was a means of domesticating and civilizing the alien terrain of the colonies."
Press release from the Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery
Family confection II (installation photos)
Sugar cubes stained with coffee and tea
Giuseppe Romeo (b. Australia 1958)
Subjective landscape, 'Of consequence rather than reason' (installation photos)
Found discarded objects, bitumen, paint
80.0 x 100.0 x 60.0 cm
Guiseppe Rome asks the simple question: 'What are you going to do with it all?'
Romeo recalls the tea sets his mother and aunts possessed and the 'good set' kept for special occasions that were rarely used. In this work a silver platter is the support for a silver cake stand upon which a teapot, creamer, sugar bowl and various serving implements jostle with items required to clean up the mess. The bat, ball and stumps are a reference to playing cricket which 'became an excuse for a big afternoon tea party in England'. A ribbon of wire holds it all together 'like a dream from Alice in Wonderland when nothing is as it seems', while a tinkling melody from a music box is a lullaby that sends us in to a contented sleep.
Romeo coats the sculpture in bitumen then paints it entirely in white. The effect is reminiscent of excavated items from an ancient ruin, as if w are peering upon the remains from a modern day Pompeii – artefacts that have been covered in lava and buried. This work alludes to the ways in which we deceive ourselves and 'attempt to keep it all together through consumption but ultimately we can't'.
Samantha Everton (b. Australia 1971)
From the series Vintage dolls 2009
Pigment print on rag paper (ed. AP2)
Courtesy of the artist and Anthea Polson Art, Queensland
Robyn Phelan (b. Australia 1965)
Porcelain wall – ode to an obsession (installation photo)
Porcelain, paperclay, cobalt oxide, timber, pigment, Jingdezhen tissue transfer
Porcelain wall – ode to an obsession (detail)
Robyn Phelan undertook a residency at the Pottery Workshop and Experimental Sculptural Factory of Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province in China in 2008. Jingdezhen is known as the porcelain capital because it has been the centre of China's ceramic production, beginning in the fourteenth century Yuan Dynasty, where fine porcelain was first exported all over the world.
Deposits of kaolinite, a clay found at Mt Kaolin nearby which can sustain very high firing temperatures produced a superior white porcelain of increased strength and translucency. Items made from kaolinite were fired with cobalt landscape designs and were highly sought after by European collectors. Over the centuries, because of excessive mining, the mountain's deposits have become depleted. Phelan's work is a lament to the desecration of the mountain and a reminder of the potential destructiveness of consumer desire.
'Let's forget about global warming' said Alice 'and have a cup of tea instead!' (installation photo)
Vintage porcelain figurine, found toys, epoxy resin, epoxy putty, retouching medium, powder pigments
Williams Sinclair Collection
'Let's forget about global warming' said Alice 'and have a cup of tea instead!' (detail)
Penny Byrne's reworked porcelain conversation piece was motivated by Republican Vice-Presidential nominee Sarah Palin's cry to 'drill, baby, drill' during her campaign in 2008. A call for increase off-shore drilling of petroleum, including sites such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Palin claimed 'that's what we hear all across the country in our rallies because people are so hungry for those domestic sources of energy to be tapped into'.1
In Byrne's piece the patriotic figures gorge themselves, blithely overindulging without care to the wastage. The new Disney production of Alice in Wonderland directed by Tim Burton had just been released and this led Byrne to reflect upon the Mad Hatter's tea party in which tea was drunk all day because time stood still and was stuck at tea-time.
Transcript: The Vice-Presidential Debate, 2 October 2008. Reprinted in the New York Times, 23 May 2012.
Joseph Banks' tea party for a Botany Bay tribesman is ruined by flies and spiders
Digital print on paper (ed. 2/5)
66.0 x 57.0 cm (sheet)
Sharon West's recreation of an afternoon tea party is set in the early days of first contact. Joseph Banks was the botanist who sailed with Captain Cook on the Endeavour on the first voyage of discovery which mapped the east coast of Australia between 1768 and 1771. While ashore he made an extensive collection of native flora and fauna which was sent back to natural history museums in England. Banks was also instrumental in the British government's decision to colonise the New South Wales settlement.
Rosalie Gascoigne (b. New Zealand 1917; arr. Australia 1943; d. Canberra 1999)
The tea party (installation photo)
Painted wood, celluloid, plastic, enamelled metal, feathers
The tea party (detail)
Rosalie Gascoigne found the kewpie dolls amongst a large number of discarded things from an abandoned sideshow at the Bungendore dump in the summer of 1976. 'I thought "Oh, those dollies, they're having a … very joyful … picnic. They're … in the paddock, they've got all these old things … they've sat down on the teapots and waved their wings around."
For Gascoigne beauty existed in the most humble of objects and the wear and tear from use only added to the appeal. The enamel teapots were also found at various dumps and were a particular focus of her collecting.
'I had a thing about enamelware because I see it as being elegant. People see the holes in it. I was collecting brown and white at the same time. To me it had a sort of elegance that a Dalmatian dog has, spotty, very elegant'.1
Rosalie Gascoigne, excerpts from her correspondence, email communication with Martin Gascoigne, 13 March 2015
Julie Dowling (b. Australia 1969)
Badimaya people, Western Australia
White with one
Synthetic polymer paint and red ochre on canvas
Collection of Jane Kleimeyer and Anthony Stuart
Julie Dowling's painting is a poignant reminder of the Stolen Generations and the plight of many young girls, forcibly removed from their families, who were brought up in government institutions and trained to be domestic servant to white families. Girls were targeted because women were considered the 'uplifters' or 'civilisers' of their communities and as future mothers their education into the values of white society was deemed essential to enable successful assimilation. Girls in service were supposed to receive a wage but often this was retained by their employer and not passed on. Dowling points out it is also a history of Stolen wages.
Michael Cook (b. Australia 1968)
Bidjara people, south-west Queensland
Object (table)
Inkjet print on Hahnemühle cotton rag (ed. 2/4 + 2AP)
140.0 x 99.0 cm
Courtesy of the artist and THIS IS NO FANTASY + dianne tanzer gallery, Melbourne
Michael Cook's photographic tableau 'turns the table' on racism. By depicting the body of a white woman as a functional object in service to others, Cook considers the dehumanisation and objectification of one race of people by another in the history of slavery.
The double portrait on the back wall is by Johann Zoffany from 1778, and features Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804) who was born into slavery in the West Indies. The daughter of an African mother, her father was an English naval officer who left her to the care of his uncle, Lord William Murray, where she was raised as an equal with Murray's niece. Murray was instrumental in outlawing slavery in the United Kingdom in 1772. In the painting Zoffany depicts the two women standing together, the niece affectionately reaching out to Belle. Hence Cook's afternoon tea is also a reminder that prejudice and racial inequality can be surmounted.
Yenny Huber (b. Austria 1980; arr. Australia 2000)
Digital print on aluminium panel (ed. 1/6)
Warrnambool Art Gallery, Victoria
Underpinned by the belief that any one person is comprised of diverse, fragmentary and often illusory selves, Yenny Huber explores the various ego states that reside within. This photograph is a self portrait taken in a hotel room, but it is also an impersonation of an identity available to women. Tea-drinking was once described as 'an infallible sign of an old maid'1 and in this work Huber offers us an image of a good Catholic girl, knees together, elbows in, sitting demurely on the couch sipping tea. It is an image of femininity constrained by the dictates of religion and outdated socially sanctioned ideals of respectable female behaviour.
The Horsham Times, Victoria, 26 April 1898
Anne Zahalka (b. Australia 1957)
Saturday 5.18 pm 1995
1995 (printed 1997)
Type C photograph (ed AP)
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Gift of the artist, 2011
Donated through the Australian Government's Cultural Gifts Program
Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery
Civic Reserve, Dunns Road, Mornington
Tuesday – Sunday 10am – 5pm
Mornington Peninsula Regional Art Gallery website


text:
Ann Kirkpatrick on Families & Children
Voted YES on four weeks of paid parental leave for federal employees.
Congressional Summary:Allows federal employees to substitute any available paid leave for any leave without pay available for either the: (1) birth of a child; or (2) placement of a child with the employee for either adoption or foster care. Makes available for any of the 12 weeks of leave an employee is entitled to for such purposes: (1) four administrative weeks of paid parental leave in connection with the birth or placement involved; and (2) any accumulated annual or sick leave.
Proponent's argument to vote Yes:
Rep. STEVE LYNCH (D, MA-9): This bill takes an important step toward improving the Federal Government's ability to recruit and retain a highly qualified workforce by providing paid parental leave to Federal and Congressional employees for the birth, adoption or placement of a child for foster care, which is a benefit that is extended to many in the private sector in other industrialized countries.
Opponent's argument to vote No:Rep. DARRELL ISSA (R, CA-49): This bill sends the wrong message at the wrong time to working American taxpayers and families that are struggling in difficult times. Our economy is in crisis, and deficits are already soaring. This bill does not have one provision to say if you make $170,000 a year, why do we have to give you this benefit, because you have to choose between feeding your children and being with your children? Certainly not. There are no protections against, in fact, those who do not need this special benefit getting it. There are no safeguards at all. As a matter of fact, this bill envisions the $1 billion over 5 years, swelling to $4 billion over 10 years or more because, in fact, they believe it should be 8 weeks of special leave. Federal employees enjoy one of the highest levels of job security, without a doubt, anywhere in the United States. I would venture to say many of them the highest. More importantly, in good times and bad, they keep their jobs. Reference: Federal Employees Paid Parental Leave Act; Bill H.R.626 ; vote number 2009-H310 on Jun 4, 2009
More funding & services for victims of domestic violence.
Kirkpatrick co-sponsored Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act
Introduction by co-sponsor Sen. Kay Hagan (D,NC):
We have a serious responsibility to ensure that women and families are protected. The rates of violence and abuse in our country are astounding and totally unacceptable: domestic violence affects more than 12 million people each year. In my home state, 73 women and children are killed on average every year because of domestic violence.
Since 1994, the STOP Program has provided grants for services, training, officers, and prosecutors, and has transformed our criminal justice system and victim support services. And this bill includes the bipartisan SAFER Act, which helps fund audits of untested DNA evidence and reduces this backlog of rape kits. I ask you: What other victims in America have to identify the attacker before authorities will take action? None.Introduction by Sen. Chuck Grassley(R,IA):
I urge my Republican colleagues, as I will do, to support the motion to proceed. There has long been bipartisan support for the Violence Against Women Act. Too many women are victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, and dating violence. There is overwhelming bipartisan support for 98% of what is contained in S. 47. [Since our negative vote last session], controversial provisions have been removed. The key stumbling block to enacting a bill at this time is the provision concerning Indian tribal courts. Negotiations are continuing, and compromises would allow the bill to pass with overwhelming bipartisan support. Introduction by Sen. Pat Leahy (D,VT):
Our bill will allow services to get to those in the LGBT community who have had trouble accessing services in the past. The rates of domestic and sexual violence in these communities are equal to or greater than those of the general population. We also have key improvements for immigrant victims of domestic and sexual violence. Source: S.47/H.R.11 13-HR0011 on Jan 22, 2013
Trump models disrespectful rhetoric & policies toward women.
Kirkpatrick signed the DWC letter to Pres. Trump
Today, 50 members of the Democratic Women's Caucus (DWC) sent a letter to President Trump in response to his disrespectful rhetoric and policies toward women. The letter is sent on the heels of Secretary Pompeo disparaging a well-renowned journalist for doing her job, and President Trump validating this behavior by stating, "you did a good job on her."
Excerpts from DWC letter:We are writing this letter in response to your continuing derogation of women in your rhetoric and policies. 'You did a good job on her. Take her out. Get rid of her. Lock her up. Send her back. Nasty woman. Disgusting. Low IQ. Whack job. Grab 'em by the pussy.' 'I can do whatever I want.'
It is most shameful that the words young girls and boys hear directed at women from the upper echelons of power are dripping with disdain and disrespect. Beyond your public policy choices--stripping away women's access to health care, undermining protections for survivors of sexual assault, reversing equal pay efforts and more--your words demonstrate a contempt for women who dare to do their jobs or speak truth to power which reflects poorly on you. It is as if you relish the opportunity to publicly humiliate any woman who fights back, speaks up, or takes up space.
This letter is of the greatest urgency because the message being sent to young girls and boys is that women don't matter and their equality is allowable only when convenient.
Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, an esteemed career diplomat committed to anti-corruption reforms who you referred to as "the woman" who is "going to go through some things" in your July 25 call with President Zelensky, was yet another casualty. After imploring your associates to "take her out," you smeared her good name and career for your own personal benefit.�
Mr. President, instead of being the biggest bully on the playground, why don't you set a moral example for our children? Source: Democratic Women's Caucus letter to President Trump 20-LTR-DWC on Jan 31, 2020
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2017-18 Governor, House and Senate candidates on Families & Children: Ann Kirkpatrick on other issues:
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


text:
Q: Why is my print function giving the wrong output in my program to print strings? The expected outcome is for example:
a
word
a sentence

This is the outcome tho:
 aword
word
a sentence

Here's the code:
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    char letter[1], word[20], sentence[100];

    scanf("%s", letter);

    scanf("%s", word);

    scanf(" %[^\n]s", sentence);

    printf("\n %s", letter);
    printf("\n %s", word);
    printf("\n %s", sentence);

    return 0;
}

A: At least these problems
No width limit
Never use scanf() to read user input into a string lacking a width in the format.  The width should be less than the array count.
char letter[1],word[20],sentence[100];
// scanf("%s", letter);
// scanf("%s", word);
// scanf(" %[^\n]s", sentence);
scanf("%0s", letter);          // "%0s" not valid.  See below
scanf("%19s", word);
scanf(" %99[^\n]s", sentence); // See below also

Buffer too small for "%s"
char letter[1] only big enough for a null string "".
To read 1 character into a string, increase size
char letter[2];
scanf("%1s", letter);

s not needed
s serves no point in " %[^\n]s".  Who or whatever text suggested an s is a poor source of coding in C practice.
// scanf(" %99[^\n]s", sentence);
scanf(" %99[^\n]", sentence);

Check return value
Test the return value from all scanf().
// scanf("%1s", letter);
if (scanf("%1s", letter) != 1) {
  fprintf(stderr, "Failed to read into letter");
  return EXIT_FAILURE;
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


text:
James Levine Returns to the Met
James Levine is a singer's conductor. Since 1971 he has riled the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra into frenzies of Wagnerian fortitude, balanced the beautiful webbed orchestration in Strauss, enchanted with the soaring cantilena of Puccinian melody, and exuded the splendour of Verdi's unparalleled palate and all to showcase the instrument he knows how to support and promote more about than practically any conductor, the voice. I have always been fascinated by this man, his intelligence, his understanding of opera, and most of all his ability to make the written page come to life in colours and flashes of light that are unfortunately missing in the bag of tricks that belong to most conductors today.
When I heard that Maestro Levine was going to return to the podium this season, I waited in great anticipation to hear which operas he would conduct. Sorely disappointed was I that he would only conduct three, and I'm sure I wasn't the only one. For those three works, Cosi Fan Tutte (which premiered last evening), Falstaff, and Wozzeck, opera fans and aficionados who truly understand the art will flock to the Met to listen to the grandeur of Levine's conducting. It's interesting how someone can be missing for a couple of years and when they return, we REALLY know what we've been missing. How does that old adage go: you don't know what you have until you've lost it?
Levine made his Met debut in 1971 following a June Festival performance of Tosca. Following further appearances with the company, he was named principal conductor of the Metropolitan Opera in February 1972 and became the Met's music director in 1976. He rose to higher acclaim In 1983 when he served as conductor and musical director for Franco Zeffirelli's screen adaptation of La Traviata, which featured the Met orchestra and chorus members. He became the company's first artistic director in 1986, but relinquished the title in 2004. There is no question that during Levine's tenure, the Met orchestra expanded its activities into the realms of recording, and performing in separate concert series for the orchestra and chamber ensembles at Carnegie Hall. Additionally, he has led the Metropolitan Opera on many domestic and international tours. For the 25th anniversary of his Met debut, Levine conducted the world premiere of John Harbison's The Great Gatsby, commissioned especially to mark the occasion. On his appointment as General Manager of the Met, Peter Gelb emphasized that James Levine was welcome to remain as long as he wanted to direct music there. How gracious of him.
Levine's curtain call from last night's Cosi Fan Tutte
Certainly, some things have changed at the Met, but last night brought the Levine we remembered (if not better) and the orchestra was at its finest. Personally, I wish it had been Puccini that he chose to conduct or a Verdi or Strauss because I've never been a huge fan of Cosi Fan Tutte, but hey…whatever we can get. I hope that Maestro Levine continues to live in good health because we definitely need him and those singers that have been either excluded or given one short run at the Met who are living examples of the machine that opera once was. The other night, during opening night, Margaret Juntwait interviewed Rosalinde Elias and suddenly just through the splendour of that speaking voice, I was transported to a time I didn't even live in, to a time not even that long ago when singing, conducting, and certainly directing, was of a different ilk. Call me a lover of the golden age….I just am. No apologies. Levine still retains aspects of those singers who influenced him, and his presence can only continue to influence the ones of today. Bravo Maestro Levine. Continued health and much much more music to come.
New York Times Review of Maestro Levine's Return to the Met
on September 26, 2013 at 2:10 am Leave a Comment
Tags: Cosi Fan Tutte 2013, James Levine, James Levine Returns to the Met, Met Opera, Metropolitan Opera, Opera
The URI to TrackBack this entry is: https://thelastverista.com/2013/09/26/james-levine-returns-to-the-met/trackback/


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Generating Photons for Communication Between Processors in a Quantum Computing System
Entangled pairs of photons are generated by and propagate away from qubits placed along a waveguide. Credit: Sampson Wilcox
New technique provides a means of interconnection between processors, opening the way to a complete quantum computing platform.
MIT researchers using superconducting quantum bits connected to a microwave transmission line have shown how the qubits can generate on demand the photons, or particles of light, necessary for communication between quantum processors.
The advance is an important step toward achieving the interconnections that would allow a modular quantum computing system to perform operations at rates exponentially faster than classical computers can achieve.
"Modular quantum computing is one technique for reaching quantum computation at scale by sharing the workload over multiple processing nodes," says Bharath Kannan, MIT graduate fellow and first author of a paper on this topic published on October 7, 2020, in Science Advances. "These nodes, however, are generally not co-located, so we need to be able to communicate quantum information between distant locations."
In classical computers, wires are used to route information back and forth through a processor during computation. In a quantum computer, the information itself is quantum mechanical and fragile, requiring new strategies to simultaneously process and communicate information.
"Superconducting qubits are a leading technology today, but they generally support only local interactions (nearest-neighbor or qubits very close by). The question is how to connect to qubits that are at distant locations," says William Oliver, an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, MIT Lincoln Laboratory fellow, director of the Center for Quantum Engineering, and associate director of the Research Laboratory of Electronics. "We need quantum interconnects, ideally based on microwave waveguides that can guide quantum information from one location to another."
That communication can occur via the microwave transmission line, or waveguide, as the excitations stored in the qubits generate photon pairs, which are emitted into the waveguide and then travel to two distant processing nodes. The identical photons are said to be "entangled," acting as one system. As they travel to distant processing nodes, they can distribute that entanglement throughout a quantum network.
"We generate the entangled photons on demand using the qubits and then release the entangled state to the waveguide with very high efficiency, essentially unity," says Oliver.
The research reported in the Science Advances paper utilizes a relatively simple technique, Kannan says.
"Our work presents a new architecture for generating photons that are spatially entangled in a very simple manner, using only a waveguide and a few qubits, which act as the photonic emitters," says Kannan. "The entanglement between the photons can then be transferred into the processors for use in quantum communication or interconnection protocols."
While the researchers said they have not yet implemented those communication protocols, their ongoing research is aimed in that direction.
"We did not yet perform the communication between processors in this work, but rather showed how we can generate photons that are useful for quantum communication and interconnection," Kannan says.
Previous work by Kannan, Oliver, and colleagues introduced a waveguide quantum electrodynamics architecture using superconducting qubits that are essentially a type of artificial giant atom. That research demonstrated how such an architecture can perform low-error quantum computation and share quantum information between processors. This is accomplished by adjusting the frequency of the qubits to tune the qubit-waveguide interaction strength so the fragile qubits can be protected from waveguide-induced decoherence to perform high-fidelity qubit operations, and then readjusting the qubit frequency so the qubits are able to release their quantum information into the waveguide in the form of photons.
This paper presented the photon generation ability of the waveguide quantum electrodynamics architecture, showing that the qubits can be used as quantum emitters for the waveguide. The researchers demonstrated that quantum interference between the photons emitted into the waveguide generates entangled, itinerant photons that travel in opposite directions and can be used for long-distance communication between quantum processors.
Generating spatially entangled photons in optical systems is typically accomplished using spontaneous parametric down-conversion and photodetectors, but the generated entanglement achieved that way is generally random and therefore less useful in enabling on-demand communication of quantum information in a distributed system.
"Modularity is a key concept of any extensible system," says Oliver. "Our goal here is to demonstrate the elements of quantum interconnects that should be useful in future quantum processors."
Reference: "Generating spatially entangled itinerant photons with waveguide quantum electrodynamics" by B. Kannan, D. L. Campbell, F. Vasconcelos, R. Winik, D. K. Kim, M. Kjaergaard, P. Krantz, A. Melville, B. M. Niedzielski, J. L. Yoder, T. P. Orlando, S. Gustavsson and W. D. Oliver, 7 October 2020, Science Advances.
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb8780
Communication, computing, Generating, Photons, processors, quantum, system
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The first Jews to settle in Britain came from Normandy at the invitation of William the Conqueror, who offered them royal protection. They were forbidden by the Church to own land, employ Christians or bear arms; however, Christians were forbidden to lend money for interest, so money-lending became one of the few means of earning a living open to them. As the founders of banking services (and also the pioneers of international business networking), Jews provided credit in a society where there were no banks as we know them today.
However, Royal protection came at a price; taxes were imposed upon Jews through a special department, The Exchequer of the Jews. Edward I drove this to the limit and in the ten years from 1263 to 1273 extracted £420,000 from the Jewish community. Then in 1290, when Jews were no longer useful as a source of revenue, he confiscated their property and expelled them.
It was over three hundred years later before Jews were once more trading in Britain. These were Marranos, Jews from Spain and Portugal who, following persecution by the Inquisition converted to Christianity and adopted Spanish or Portuguese names while still continuing to practice their Jewish religion in secret. Outwardly living in London as Catholics, they attended mass at the Portuguese Embassy.
The Netherlands, at the centre of Western Europe, was a Spanish colony in the sixteenth century and witnessed some of the most bitter conflicts and atrocities of religious persecution. A geographically small country located at the mouths of some of Europe's great trading rivers, the population was not only highly concentrated but also strongly divided by religious affiliation. Religious tolerance was the key to political stability after Independence, so that Puritans, Anabaptists and Catholics could live together peacefully and maintain trade with the rest of the world, the new nation's lifeblood.
After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many Marranos fled first to Portugal but moved in from there later when the Inquisition arrived. Amsterdam became the most popular destination, a place where they could openly practice their religion. Through the first half of the seventeenth century, Amsterdam became the world's leading trading city and the home of a thriving Jewish community. In 1654, a group of Jews sailed from Amsterdam to the Americas and founded the first Jewish community in the New World.
When Oliver Cromwell came to power, he saw, with the overthrow of the Monarchy, the opportunity to put in its place the 'ideal' state, driven by Puritan religious zeal. In fact, so momentous had been the overthrow of the old order that its demise was seen to be as much as a religious event as a political one. And it is this interpretation that formed the link between Cromwell and a rabbi of the Amsterdam Portuguese Jews community, Menasseh ben Israel. The transition from the miseries of the Inquisition to the prosperity and freedom to practice Judaism of seventeenth century Amsterdam in so short a space of time was readily seen as a portent indicating the imminent arrival of the Messiah.
Ancient prophecies hold that the dawning of the Millennium, (the Second Coming for Christians), will only start when the Jews have been scattered to the four corners of the world. Dutch and English Puritans at the time believed that it was therefore essential to have Jews living in England and a petition for this was sent to Cromwell in 1649 by two English Puritans living in Amsterdam. At this time, rumours were circulating that one of the lost tribes of Israel had been found in South America but by 1655, the presence of Jews in the New World was beyond dispute; the first American community had been established by settlers from Amsterdam the previous year.
Menasseh ben Israel arrived in London in 1655 and delivered a petition to Cromwell, asking for Jews to be readmitted to live and trade in England. There was strong opposition, not least from London merchants who did not welcome further competition. A special conference of judges, clergy and merchants was convened by Cromwell in December, 1655. The conference did not go well, however, despite Cromwell's strong advocacy of readmission. So Cromwell dismissed the conference.
Within a month, war broke out between England and Spain. All the property of Spanish citizens trading in England was confiscated and one Marrano, Antonio Robles, went to law, protesting that his Spanish citizenship has been adopted under duress and that his real nationality was Jewish.
In the event, no reply was needed. In May, Robles won his case and this established that a Jew could live in England. Soon afterwards, a house was leased in Creechurch Lane in the City of London and converted into a synagogue, which opened in 1657.
The Congregation thrived through the Restoration and in 1699, a nearby site was obtained for the building of a new synagogue; a secluded courtyard off a street called Bevis Marks. The building contract was given to Joseph Avis, a Quaker. According to tradition, Avis refused to take financial gain from building a House of God and returned to the Congregation whatever profit he had made. It is also said that an oak beam in the roof was presented by Princess Anne, later to become Queen. The largest of the Synagogue's seven chandaliers of the Great Synagogue was presented by the Congregation of the Great Synagogue in Amsterdam.
Tolerance has served the City of London well for centuries - and continues to do so. The seventeenth century Marranos were preceded by the Huguenots and followed by many others, including, in the last century, the East African Asians. Today, the City is Europe's largest centre for financial services and plays host to the European Headquarters of almost every non-European financial institution of global standing.


Erie County District Attorney John J. Flynn announces that a jury has found 22-year-old James Taylor of Buffalo guilty, as charged, on one count of Criminal Possession of a Weapon in the Second Degree, a Class "C" felony. The defendant was convicted on the only count in the indictment against him.
On June 29, 2018, the Buffalo Police Department was investigating a shooting that occurred earlier at approximately 8 p.m. on June 28 on Burgard Place in the City of Buffalo. A witness provided the description of a red Ford Fusion.
Around midnight, officers located a red Ford Fusion matching the description, which was parked with its engine running on the 2700 block of Bailey Avenue, approximately a mile away from the shooting on Burgard Place. When police approached the vehicle and asked the occupants for identification, a revolver was viewed in plain sight under the rear center console of the vehicle.
Officers recovered the revolver, which was loaded with five rounds. The gun was submitted to the Erie County Central Police Services Laboratory where it was determined to be operable.
Taylor faces a maximum of 15 years in prison when he is sentenced by Erie County Court Judge James Bargnesi on Monday, March 25, 2019 at 9:30 a.m. The defendant remains remanded without bail.
DA Flynn commends Detective Christopher Gerace, Lt. Jonathan Pietrzak and Officer Jason Schnelle of the Buffalo Police Department for their work in the investigation.
The case was prosecuted by Assistant District Attorney Patrick B. Shanahan of the DA's Tactical Prosecution Unit and Assistant District Attorney Ryan M. Flaherty of the DA's Felony Trials Bureau.


For those who enjoy the game of golf, this custom imprinted Golf Buddy Kit will be your best friend. The item is very interesting in the sense that it includes a beaded chain that will attach to your key chain or golf bag. Attached to the chain are 12 golf ball tees and 3 golf ball markers to help recipients play their game with ease. This item can be distributed at golf outings, but will also work well at any public or outdoor promotional event.
3 7/8" x 2 1/4" x 1/2"


Leslie Nielsen the 84 year old veteran actor died of pneumonia complications. Canadian born Neilson a former air force gunner and radio DJ got his first big break in the 1950s going onto star in many movies including Flying High and the Naked Gun trilogy. The first half of his 60 year career, he worked in various TV shows including 'Peyton Place' building his reputation in playing authority figures such as the 1972 feature movie 'The Poseidon Adventure' as the captain of the cruise ship. However he is best remembered for his later work in the deadpan delivery of comedy stretches that kept on doing 'dumb and stupid'.