Detail 2 A painting’s background in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel ‘To the Lighthouse’
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever. — Penguin Classics 2019, p.24.
Detail A painting’s background in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel ‘To the Lighthouse’, 2025; Watercolour, lead pencil and varnish on paper, acrylic on wood; 102 x 82 x 4.6 By Gail Hastings —Showing the tennis court on the left, pampas grass surrounding it, and the red-hot poker plants at ‘b’.
Detail 1 – A painting’s background in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel ‘To the Lighthouse’
Virginia Woolf, ‘To the Lighthouse’ … The geranium in the urn became startlingly visible and, displayed among its leaves, he could see, without wishing it, that old, that obvious distinction between the two classes of men; on the one hand the steady goers of superhuman strength who, plodding and persevering, repeat the whole alphabet in order, twenty-six letters in all, from start to finish; on the other the gifted, the inspired who, miraculously, lump all the letters together in one flash—the way of genius. He had not genius; he laid no claim to that: but he had, or might have had, the power to repeat every letter of the alphabet from A to Z accurately in order. Meanwhile, he stuck at Q. On, then, on to R. — Penguin Classics 2019, p.40.
Detail A painting’s background in Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, 2025 Watercolour, lead pencil and varnish on paper, acrylic on wood 102 x 82 x 4.6 By Gail Hastings — Showing two of the urns at the bottom of the stairs outside the dining room.
Today’s art history of unwritten yesterdays
Call for papers deadline: Wednesday 31 July, 2024
Panel convenor: Gail Hastings
Art historian Bernard Smith contends that a past of unwritten yesterdays does not become history until a historian attempts to write what happened in it. Yet, to find oneself in “apocalyptic jitters” at the thought of writing contemporary art history is to misidentify the need, first, for dusk to fall before the owl of Minerva can spread its wings (Smith, 2007, p. 123). For Smith, in mind of G. W. F Hegel’s philosophy, not until an art-epoch ends does its tenets form a whole worthy of a historian’s attention. At odds, however, with this notion of our contemporary suspension of the present, is its simultaneous saturation with the philosophy of Giles Deleuze. Here the present, instead, eludes existence (e.g. see The Logic of Sense). The present, divided between the past and future to infinity, is at work this way in Smith’s reference to Claude Monet’s Haystack series of 1890-91. The painter’s brushstrokes race against the changing light to become “not so much a record of time present as a personal experience of time past” (Smith, 2007, p. 69). If, however, against this, one still holds for contemporary art’s dusk before its history can begin, then there is E. H. Gombrich to contend with. In 1977, Gombrich dubbed Hegel the father of art history. Then, advocated we free art history of Hegel.
The panel will comprise three 20 minute papers on these matters or the question: Is art history ending because we cannot make historical sense of contemporary art?
Reference Smith, B. (2007). The formalesque: A guide to modern art and its history. Macmillan.
2024 AAANZ CONFERENCE PAST, PRESENT, POSSIBLE FUTURES Wednesday 4 to Friday 6 December 2024, Australian National University, Canberra
Highly Commended
Chuffed to have just discovered Associate Professor Martyn Jolly and Associate Professor Robert Nelson’s commendation of Space Practising Tools, 2021, in the AAANZ 2022 Best Artist-led Publication list of prizes.
The two judges write: This artist’s book wittily instantiates the formalist principles it methodically elucidates. It is meticulously complete down to every detail, and the artist’s personal creative style is satisfyingly sustained across 116 pages. The book’s design, referencing modernist manuals, delivers the pleasure of several gentle jokes, such as the afterimage produced when the reader is invited to stare at a black dot on a white page. While being an integral aesthetic object, the book successfully calls in the conceptual references points that had informed Hastings’ practice as an artist.
Thank you Martyn Jolly and Robert Nelson — GH
Afternoon Tea
Amelia Wallin, La Trobe Art Institute, serves afternoon tea at 4:00pm as part of Afternoon Tea at 4:00pm in Citational choices by Isabelle Sully.
‘Citational choices’ opens 25 October
from La Trobe Art Institute Instagram account @latrobe_ai
‘Citational choices’ opens 25 October ‘Citational choices’ takes La Trobe University’s Etta Hirsh Ceramics Collection as its point of departure. The exhibition unravels the biographical stories present within the collection itself — those of Etta Hirsh, of a local art scene, of La Trobe Art Institute and now, in the case of this exhibition, everyone newly involved.
Please join us for the opening celebration and a conversation led by curator Isabelle Sully on Friday 28 October at 5 pm.
Image: Milton Moon, ‘Conical form’, 1997; stoneware, glaze, brushwork decoration, 10 x 12.5 x 40 cm. La Trobe University, Etta Hirsh Ceramics Collection. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Anouk and Vaughan Hulme in memory of Etta Hirsh. Courtesy the estate of Milton Moon. Photo: Christopher Sanders
I acknowledge the Kulin Nation’s Yaluk-ut Weelam clan of the Boon Wurrung people as custodians of the lands, waterways and skies where I live and work. I pay my respect to their Elders past, present and emerging. I recognise their cultural faithfulness, strength and resilience against the trauma of colonisation. First Peoples’ sovereignty has never been ceded. Gail Hastings
