LAA#119: The Road Trip

Shifting focus - identifying with landscapes through sight, sound and memory.

Firstly apologies for the perhaps fragmented theme of this piece – it is an amalgam of some of the things I have been seeing, doing, reading or thinking of over the past month or two. One of my passions is contemporary art, and how it is (often) derived from artists experiences of landscape. A ‘Landscape Now’ approach I suppose. Other passions are music and travel, and how there is more than a thread of music involved in the memory of landscape traveled through.

I have had a major flashback while visiting Perth for the AILA WA awards, in May this year. Fremantle Arts Centre held an exhibition titled the ‘Bon Scott Project’.

The exhibition ran from May 17 – June 22, so you will have missed it by the time of publication. The show includes works by nineteen artists, not necessarily fans from the old days, who examine the Bon Scott phenomena - and it is a phenomena- Bon’s grave at Fremantle Cemetery is the most visited grave in Australia. The exhibition also included a series of Bon’s letters home, first within Australia, then later the world. Very interesting to read what Bon thought of Skyhooks, amongst a lot of things that one probably need not read about, and certainly not repeat – though there is a taste on the website.

It is worth hitting the link below,particularly for Bevan Honey’s Apparition Stirling Highway Bridge, looking towards East Fremantle, 2008. For some fun, the Dolomiten Polka Band do a great take on It’s a long way to the top (if you want to rock and roll), then for the real thing, check out YouTube. Live, on the flat-top truck, Bon with the bagpipes no less, and a now very old Melbourne (even pre DCM) as a backdrop. What next! Now music videos will be noted in heritage citations.

What makes a landscape memorable? One way is seeing it for the first time. John Keats got it right with ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’. The last four lines:

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific – and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise–
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
A never-to-be-forgotten experience to be sure. Adding sound to a landscape experience adds to the intensity. Think of your key road journeys, do you remember the music? Here are a few personal favourites, separated by over 30 years:

Early in 1978 a group of school friends drove from Sydney to Newcastle, to see Radio Birdman. The song on the cassette player as we drove through the sandstone bluffs of the Peter Spooner alignments of the F3 freeway? Jonathon Richman and the Modern Lovers 1977 Beserkley release, Roadrunner.

Just last year, while in Strasbourg, and about to hire a car to drive up the Rhine Valley to Belfort, I spied Lou Reed’s Berlin. Perfect choice for the freeway, and almost forced a left turn into Germany, away from our intended destination. Later that trip, preparing for a drive through Ireland, I looked for some old Rory Gallagher (Bullfrog Blues anyone)? but settled for the perhaps more authentic Shane McGowan and the Pogues. A leap back to 1975 – an overnight on the TEE train from Paris to Amsterdam predated Kraftwerk’s 1977 Trans Europe Express, now my memories of that train journey are overlaid by proto-techno music with a inscrutably Germanic monotone vocal. If you have done the trip, and heard the song, you will know what I mean.

As for some Australian examples, I never really understood Queensland sugarcane until a few years ago, when I flew in to Proserpine, on the way to a site in Airlie Beach – after that Cattle and Cane by the Go-Betweens makes sense. For an urban experience, Chris Bailey and Ed Kuepper’s (I’m) Stranded brings a cutting dislocation to bear, bringing memories of late nights and the postindustrial spaces of cities. Transpose the Saints’ epic with Jonathan Richman’s The Lonely Financial Zone, from the Modern Lovers second Album.

Our experiences and memories need not be terrestrially based. For those in Sydney, you would have done well to see Franck Gohier’s exhibition Darwin 1942 at Ray Hughes Gallery. The show ran from 10th May to 5th June. The works focus on the Japanese bombing of Darwin, and the personal responses of the Aussie pilots who ‘scrambled’ to take on the Japanese bomber and Zeroes. Kym Bonython was one of those Mosquito-flying pilots, who on landing, after flying over the awesome landscape around Darwin, Katherine and the Tiwi Islands, would apocryphally unwind by listening to his jazz records. Kym is held to have introduced jazz to Australians, the sad irony is he lost his jazz records twice – in Darwin, 1942, and later in the Ash Wednesday fires of 1983, at his Adelaide Hills home.

Travel, memory and temporality converge in Fluctuating Borders: Speculations about Memory and Emergence edited by Rosalea Monacella and Sue Anne Ware RMIT University Press Melbourne, 2007. The book is a collection of essays on Borders, Memory, Temporality and Emergence. The chapter ‘Borders’ considers the Mexican/United States border, both the design of Mexican border cities, and the fluidity of the border. ‘Borders’ also discusses the effects of Israel’s annexation wall through the occupied Palestinian territories. The chapter ‘Memory’ presents the SIEV X Memorial Project – still in place at Canberra’s Weston Park.

For another take on laminate, see Mat de Mosier’s show at Flinders Street Gallery, Sydney 4-22 June (I have checked the website– www.flindersstreetgallery.com). There are several interpretations of the Rose Seidler House, and the wider urban landscape.

PS

Since my last Perspective I have spotted:

Catherine, walking her dog past my house (and dogs) Cia, twice within a week, with her children at the local hairdresser, on my way to the post office Andy & Anna, in Kings Park, Perth, of all places, on Sunday after the AILA WA awards.