Yesterday, quite unexpectedly, I ended up at both the Ron Mueck exhibition at the NGV, and then a pre-release showing of the movie Precious.

I’ve seen a lot of Ron Mueck’s pieces, in different places around the world, but nothing prepared me for what it would be like to see them together. His work is human sculptures, sometimes huge, sometimes tiny – all captured in what seem like transition moments; thin places, as such. I swear they have souls.

The review in the paper said that the crowd reaction was half the experience, and it was right. Normally when we come face to face with installations about humanity we don’t like what we see. We half turn away from it, and each other. I think it frightens us, maybe, or disgusts us… But people were walking around this one smiling, talking to each other. It was like this celebration of what connects us, rather than an avoidance of it. It’s hard to describe, but it’s different to how i’ve seen a crowd at an exhibition before.

Every time someone would approach one of the sculptures they would search out the eyes first and look into them. I did too. It was an unconscious, instinctive reaction. I think we were looking for wisdom or truth, and without being trite, it felt like we might have seen it.

[these photos were all taken on my phone - there are some great photos here]
–
Two older women, approaching ‘Youth‘:
W1: is that a stab wound?
W2: i think it’s from barbed wire.
W1: no he’s been stabbed.
[momentary pause]
W1: i hate it when young people wear their trousers so their underwear shows. do they do that in brisbane too?

–
In the afternoon we went to see Precious, which opens in Melbourne this week. It’s as beautiful and confronting as all the reports say. One of those films you feel lucky to have seen – like a life you feel privileged to have witnessed. I was nervous it would be too Hollywood – that it would be a story about someone rescuing Precious from her life, but while she had her champions, and couldn’t have done it without them, it was always a story about her courage and her determination.

This was the moment of the film that won me over. It was Precious’ first day at the new school. Her teacher Blu asks her to say something to the class:

Precious: I never talked in class before.
Blu: How did that make you feel?
Precious: Here. It made me feel like I was here.

Craig responded to my last post about this by saying that it’s a good thing to use the installation to talk about baptism and death and things like that – and he’s right. Of course it’s fabulous to use things of culture to bring the great christian themes to life… it’s brilliant, and the more it happens the better. I’m working on a workshop for Thursday, and half the material is about that…

I do hope though that it doesn’t end there. I know this is more about the space i’m in at the moment [i don't spend a lot of time talking with christians], but i’m really interested in exploring how someone outside the church interprets ‘Ocean without a shore’… Sometimes we’re so grateful for things that we can use in a christian context that we forget they have meaning outside our context that perhaps is worth exploring. What does ‘Oceans without a shore’ say to people who aren’t christian about life and grief and death and transcendence and reality [and whatever else?]… What do they do with the emotions that it evokes? And then if we’re going to use it, how do we shape worship or sacred spaces to honour and speak into those emotions and experiences, not just describe our own story?

I’m not sure I’m explaining that very well yet.

Watching yesterday, we were sitting next to these two men. The four of us were the only ones there, and after about 30 minutes, one of the men got up and went to leave the room. ‘Too fucking beautiful’, he said as he walked out. ‘It’s too fucking beautiful…’

I’m back from a couple of weeks leave, which were spent, delightfully, doing almost nothing. I had originally planned to be in Italy but we decided it would take much less energy to travel down the road to daylesford for a long weekend, which was interrupted only slightly by the smell of smoke from a bushfire on the horizon, and spend the rest of the time at home – watching The Wire obsessively on dvd, resurrecting a sunburnt garden, and making occasional forays to art galleries and the movies.

The Wire is superb – it’s not on tv in australia yet, which is hard to believe. I really wish Underbelly [which i hate] would disappear and this would be put on instead… though it has been noted that i’m swearing much more since watching it [those who know me beyond this blog may find it hard to believe that's possible].

I went to the Bill Viola video installation, Ocean without a Shore, at the NGV on Sunday.

It’s just been purchased as part of the permanent collection, and it’s just wonderful. I’ve seen a few of his installations, and this one feels like it’s the perfect choice for melbourne. The crude description is that it’s videos of people walking through a wall of water, from clouded obscurity into vivid reality… the real description is that it’s about humanity, mortality, beauty, fragility… I know people will christianise it, and say it’s a great depiction of baptism or resurrection, but it’s also fundamentally human at its very core, and to christianise it runs the risk of diminishing the common humanity that is expressed. Sometimes we forget that christianity doesn’t hold the copyright on every experience of transcendence.

This a youtube video of Bill Viola talking about the installation.

On the movie front, ‘I’ve loved you so long’ was the pick – achingly beautiful.

It seems we’re in the middle of Lent, which has pretty much passed me by completely. The fires here, which were an urgent threat in many communities for nearly 4 weeks have overshadowed anything else, and really will for a long time. It’s impossible to comprehend what it would be like to live with that threat for so long – to be in the ‘now and not yet’ peculiar to this kind of devastation – people living in the aftermath of that first frightful weekend of the fires, trying to come to terms with the loss of people they love, with the loss of possessions, and with the loss of everything familiar both physical and spiritual – and yet having to be aware that there are fires still burning that could change direction at any moment and wreak their devastation again.

Talking about deliberately entering a wilderness, or thinking that any wilderness we could conjure up for lent might actually bear some resemblance to reality, seems somewhat crass this year. The concepts of loneliness, fear, desolation, resilience and mortality have all been ratcheted up a notch, taken to a place that faith is yet to reach.

this is an exhibition currently simultaneously in the making and on show at the NGV in melbourne. It’s 400 000 pieces of white lego… members of the public work with the artist to build them into a cityscape and then it’s dismantled to begin again each day…

I took this photo as we were walking past the water wall at the front of the gallery on saturday. the gallery was closed, so this was the only shot i could get [but i love it!]. the cityscape fills the length of the window. it was quite dark when we were walking past. it looked beautiful, quite ghostly.

the installation is on until may. plenty of time left to go play with the lego.