Happy Diwali

This in haste - today is the day you can lure wealth and prosperity in your door by lighting candles, lamps, and even switching on electric lights, according to what is says on the BBC website, quoted below.
Worth a try!:


"Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights, is the most popular of all the festivals from South Asia, and is also the occasion for celebrations by Jains and Sikhs as well as Hindus.

The festival of Diwali extends over five days. Because of the lights, fireworks, and sweets involved, it's a great favourite with children.

The festival celebrates the victory of good over evil, light over darkness, and knowledge over ignorance, although the actual legends that go with the festival are different in different parts of India.

The Times of India summed up the modern meaning of Diwali:
"Regardless of the mythological explanation one prefers, what the festival of
lights really stands for today is a reaffirmation of hope, a renewed
commitment to friendship and goodwill, and a religiously sanctioned
celebration of the simple - and some not so simple - joys of life."
Times of India editorial

In Britain, as in India, the festival is a time for thoroughly spring-cleaning the home and for wearing new clothes and most importantly, decorating buildings with fancy lights.

The date of Diwali is set by the Hindu calendar and so it varies in the Western calendar. It usually falls in October or November.

Diwali is a New Year festival in the Vikrama calendar, where it falls on the night of the new moon in the month of Kartika.

Business people regard it as a favourable day to start a new accounting year because of the festival's association with the goddess of wealth.

Diwali is also used to celebrate a successful harvest.

The name of the festival comes from the Sanskrit word dipavali, meaning row of lights.

Diwali is known as the 'festival of lights' because houses, shops, and public places are decorated with small earthenware oil lamps called diyas. These lamps, which are traditionally fueled by mustard oil, are placed in rows in windows, doors and outside buildings to decorate them.

The lamps are lit to help the goddess Lakshmi find her way into people's homes. They also celebrate one of the Diwali legends, which tells of the return of Rama and Sita to Rama's kingdom after fourteen years of exile.

In towns (and in Britain) electric lights are often used in Diwali displays.

In India oil lamps are often floated across the river Ganges - it is regarded as a good omen if the lamp manages to get all the way across.

Fireworks are also a big part of the Diwali celebrations, although in recent years there has been a move against them because of noise and atmospheric pollution and the number of accidental deaths and injuries.

Two Goddesses in particular are celebrated at Diwali: Lakshmi and Kali.
Lakshmi, wealth and prosperity
For many Indians the festival honours Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth.

People start the new business year at Diwali, and some Hindus will say prayers to the goddess for a successful year.

Some people build a small altar to the goddess and decorate it with money and with pictures of the rewards of wealth, such as cars and houses.
Celebrating Lakshmi Hindus will leave the windows and doors of their houses open so that Lakshmi can come in. Rangoli are drawn on the floors - rangoli are patterns and the most popular subject is the lotus flower. This because images of Lakshmi traditionally show her either holding a lotus or sitting on one.

There is much feasting and celebration, and the Diwali lamps are regarded as making it easy for Lakshmi to find her way to favoured houses.

Marty Kelly - Art London 2009 Catalogue Note

Like the best of contemporary dance, Marty Kelly’s recent paintings exude a dreamy ambiguity – that stuff that exists in between the words. So it makes sense that he’s finding inspiration with a couple of contemporary dancers in Barcelona – bypassing the intellect to get straight to some visceral feeling and truth.

Far from his home on Donegal’s remote and windswept Inishowen peninsula, contemporary dance stopped wandering painter Marty Kelly in his tracks while he was travelling through Switzerland a few years back. Crossing paths with Quebec’s Dave St. Pierre Dancers was a revelation to him. “It was amazing to me. There was a connection between my work, our intentions, the common music we used and were inspired by, and the dancers”. Up until then Kelly had been travelling through places like Sarajevo in search of inspiration. After this serendipitous meeting, he began to find something matching “the incredible human spirit that lasts on and burns on in these conflicts” - the truth he wanted to paint - in dancers’ bodies.

Contemporary dance is all about getting back to a deep inner truth buried within the body. Was it the pure emotion of contemporary dance, unencumbered by words that drew him in? Had his eureka moment to do with the rawness, the strange, tough beauty which he felt, correctly, was “never allowing romance to fully overtake the reality, but elements of both”? For how can you do tutu’s after contemplating atrocities, and places of conflict as Kelly did in recent years? Far from the prettiness of Edward Degas’s limbering-up ballerinas, Kelly began to immerse himself in the more unlikely stuff that contemporary dance celebrates: “…the beauty in the awkward poses and the in-between. A moment before an action or a bowed head after a clatter of movement”.

Kelly began to work in his Barcelona studio with contemporary dancers Merryn Kritzinger, and Ygal Tsur – videoing them, photographing them, and painting them. They listened to his intentions, and to his music, and danced. (Kelly couldn’t imagine painting without music – at the moment it’s classical minimalists Max Richter, Johan Johansson, John Williams, and Nathan Larson).

It’s no surprise then that through that downright honesty of muscles, physical exertion, and the sweat of contemporary dance Kelly is right in there, into the non-verbal, and the eloquently visceral. Here, where there is no posing. Kelly rubs out faces, details, smudges them, and re-creates his models into floating, glunky, out-of-focus ethereal creatures. Essences. I imagine him distilling these essences out through their movement as if in some sort of alchemical filtering process. On his canvas then elphin and otherworldly presences emerge.

Just like the power of dance revealed itself to him in composer Johann Johansson’s collaborations with dancer Erna Omarsdottir, “exposed and raw and honest, sensitive and very real art”, this is beautiful work in flesh and blood from a sure hand and mind. Sure like the hand and mind of a dancer, perhaps.

So what do I see here of contemporary dance? The interiority of it; the “right now” of it; the velocity of it; the stubborn refusal to be just “pretty”; its contrary nature; its home in the ambiguous, fudged-up in-between; its dynamic energy - its vitality.

Like in contemporary dance, the vagueness, and the moments of emptiness in these paintings, add up to an enticing open invitation to the viewer to project him or herself into the work of art.

By-passing head-energy, the intellect, the blah blah blah/ parler pour rien dire of words, Marty Kelly gets right underneath misleading externals to plug in to the power of the unspoken. Accessing the raw, visceral emotion of alive, pulsating bodies Kelly unleashes that power through these floating bodies, submerged bodies, bodies in transit, bodies in motion, and bodies without background. Harnessing the anarchic energy of contemporary dance onto his canvas, in his latest work Kelly accesses and conveys a rich and yes, incredible human spirit. That sort of thing is elusive, but through his strategies Marty Kelly has caught us a beautiful glimpse of it here.

Guerilla Girls, Irish Art, and the Age of Aquarius...

I was at a very thought-provoking, and indeed incendiary talk by the "Guerilla Girls" (www.guerillagirls.com) out at Theatre M in UCD last night. As well as the two "Guerillas", wearing, yes, Guerilla heads (must be hard to breathe in there, let alone talk!) other panelists included Irish Art expert Catherine Marshall and the inimitable journalist Susan McKay. (We were honoured to have Susan involved in "South Africa Week" at the Helix, which I co-curated a few moons ago - who's counting?). The Guerillas had compiled some pretty shocking statistics about the paltry representation of women in our national Art collections, in the management of these institutions (I'll get them and quote them later), and the one stat I can recall (it obviously made a big impression on me), is that while women make up 70% of Humanities students, they only comprise 10% of faculty. Go figure! Eloquent statistics, indeed. What's more (how well I know this), women artists are barely even recorded in our archives - here are a few I know of personally: Erina Brady, June Fryer, Ninette de Valois, Doreen Cuthbert... Catherine Morris, who is reclaiming the lost history of Alice Milligan (watch this space in National Library of Ireland next year), was also there, pointing out how challenging it is to document these lost women artists. Archiving and reclaiming their stories and work is like an exercise in extreme lateral thinking, as they don't exist in any official archive.
So does this mean that in official history, they are "personae non grata"? In my experience, finding these invisible histories can start with a letter to The Irish Times, 90 phone-calls, and then take you into living rooms around Dublin and fading old family photograph collections. What does that say about how this state values and archives women's art? I bet there are no photographs of WB Yeats lost in family photo albums. Oh no. That's "le patrimoine". But what about "la Matrimoine"???
Susan McKay, as part of National Women's Council has initiated a "Spot the Woman" campaign to highlight any inequities that may exist here in all areas of work (not just the Arts). Thought feminism was an outmoded, outdated concept? Apparently not! Guerilla Girls are at University of Ulster, and the opening of their new Guerrilla Girls project about art in Ireland, opens at Millenium Court Arts Centre, Portadown, Northern Ireland this Friday. Go guerillas!

Check this link for the statistical, unemotional, objective facts I mentioned:

http://www.guerillagirls.com/posters/ireland.shtml

Well all I can say is "roll on the age of Aquarius" as described by Marie, in a wonderful and yes, enlightened blog comment, below (thanks Marie!).

Marie's Great Comment to the previous blog:

"It's the dawning of the age of Aquarius - like that old song from "Hair"- we are increasingly measuring the success of our society by women's standards. In other words, how happy and creative and communicative we are as a society is a more meaningful measurement than that old macho bugbear, Gross Domestic Product! Our government is failing to value the things that really mean something to us - health, education, the arts - and instead is focused on all those competitive macho indicators like who has the most money, cars, property, and face-time with other competitors to strut like cockerels at Davos and the rest. Perhaps the arts will be more inventive and effective in communicating these kinds of protests to a larger audience than those weaker people lying in the neglected hospitals of this country! Keep it up, Deirdre! End of rant. :-P"

The Arts = The Goose with the Golden Eggs; Morning Ireland, and Ingeborg Bachmann

Launching the campaign against Arts cuts on Morning Ireland yesterday, Colm Toibin asked the presenters to name a writer from The Cayman Islands (ummmm.... not coming up with anyone), or from Austria. Well, Austria has a few. But us, we are steeped in the good fortune to be synonymous internationally with James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Brian Friel, JM Synge, WB Yeats, Marina Carr, Kate O'Brien, Flann O'Brien, Martin McDonagh, the list goes on. And on and on... Money couldn't buy good publicity like that for "brand Ireland". Who has poor Iceland got, to change the international focus from their financial blunders? And as Toibin astutely pointed out, Irish writers, and the Irish Arts, unlike the church, the bankers (and so on), have never let us down. So where is the logic in now letting the Arts down, our best Ambassador, with crippling cuts? Let's stay synonymous with those great names, and keep them coming, by supporting the campaign against Arts Cuts. Because that would be cutting off our nose despite our face...

Here is my point in response to the report on the Morning Ireland site:

23/09/2009 10:14:25 Deirdre Mulrooney
In answer to your question - Ingeborg Bachmann is a lovely writer from Austria - I'm surprised Colm Toibin doesn't know of her work. For example "The Thirtieth Year" - well worth a read. However I absolutely agree with Colm Toibin's sentiments this morning on your show. The Arts are simply the goose with the golden eggs for this country. Don't kill the goose!

http://www.rte.ie/news/morningireland/totheeditor.html

& here is a link to the campaign - join right now!:

http://www.ncfa.ie/

and:

http://nationalcampaignforthearts.wordpress.com

Jenny Roche's Gradcam Talk on her PhD research

We had dance-artist Jenny Roche come in today to Gradcam to talk about her PhD, "Moving Identities: Multiplicity, Embodiment, and the Contemporary Dancer", which is within a hair's breath of completion at Roehampton University. Fascinating! Particularly about the agency of the Independent Contemporary Dancer... I think her methodology, and the whole issue of embodiment and how to deal with that in the academic world floored everybody. Plus it was nice to see her three solos, choreographed by John Jasperse, Jodi Melnick, and Liz Roche (her sister) once again. Where does the choreographer end, and the dancer begin? Food for thought. Thought and movement...

Dance review: Baryshnikov at the Broad Stage

Dance review: Baryshnikov at the Broad Stage

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This is totally amazing. Ana Laguna at 53, and the beautiful Misha at 61. Look at it! Read it!
Wow!

Abandoned Beatles Ashram, Rishikesh, India 2009

Seen as it is 09-09-09, and the launch date of the Beatles digitally re-mastered back-catalogue - here are some recent pix of the abandoned (except for the guy who opens the "No Entry" gate - for the modest sum of 50 rupees) Maharishi Mahesh (RIP) ashram in Rishikesh, India. Rishikesh, btw, is like India's answer to Lourdes, Fatima, and Knock. And it was to this very place that the Beatles came in 1969, did a meditation course, and dreamed up THE WHITE ALBUM. Seriously - this is the place! Look it up on Youtube! Mia Farrow, Donovan, and The Beach Boys were here too. Dig the "Meditation Eggs". And how about that post-box? We ran into a couple of German devotees of the guru, who reminded us that the entire New Age Movement started right here, forty years previously, with the Beatles 1969 sojourn. Too groovy! TTFN.
Happy nine-nine-nine!