Read Island Magazine, #153

Island Magazine, #153

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Description:"Years ago, during another life as a dealer in rare books and manuscripts, I bought a copy of a Beckett play at auction. It was the ugliest book that has ever passed through my a paperback, seventeenth edition, covers torn, pages crumpled and scribbled over. Its busted spine was brutally reinforced with silver duct tape. And yet this book was special. It was the prompt copy of the San Quentin Players’ performance of Samuel Beckett’s 'Endgame', which took place in the old gallows room of the infamous jail.Beckett was appalled by incarceration. He expressed a lifelong curiosity and compassion for those trapped inside the penal system. Living across from the La Santé Prison in Paris, Beckett would sometimes communicate with the inmates using a mirror and semaphore. Later on, he would direct performances of his own plays using former convicts as actors, or else assist them to direct in his place. Most famously he befriended and made a colleague of Rick Cluchey, the man whose copy of 'Endgame' I bought that day at Sotheby’s.Cluchey first heard 'Waiting for Godot' performed at San Quentin in 1957, where he was serving a life sentence for armed robbery (I say ‘heard’ because he did not attend the performance; he listened to it through the bars of his cell) and it is not too dramatic to say that this encounter with Beckett’s play changed his life. Here was a work of art that communicated something of the cruelty and absurdity, the slow violence of imprisonment. After his sentence was commuted in the mid-1960s, Cluchey spent the rest of his life performing Beckett, attempting to transmit something of the power of art to critique the system of surveillance, control and punishment he had known from within.This winter, Dark Mofo and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery are set to explore similar territory in a new exhibition, guest curated by Swiss curator Barbara Polla, with Olivier Varenne and Mary Knights. A Journey to Freedom – which draws together works by contemporary national and international artists working across installation, sculpture, video, photography and virtual reality – ‘explores issues relating to incarceration from a range of different cultural and historical from Tasmania’s dark convict past; to ‘doing time’ in the notorious “Pink Palace” Risdon Prison; and the experience of refugees held in camps and detention centres in Australia and beyond.’This issue of Island has been shaped in part to fit with this ambitious project. It is a rich subject for literary responses – and Tasmania, founded as a prison island after all, is a rich location for thinking through its implications. But as the contributions to this issue reveal, once we begin to explore ideas of imprisonment and freedom, official categories and received wisdom begin to break down. Van Diemen’s Land began as a penal colony with a reputation for unrelenting misery at the end of the world. Yet economic development (based in no small part on the cheap labour afforded free settlers by earlier waves of convicts) gradually altered the transportation came to be seen as almost an opportunity – for improvement, renewal, a fresh start. To complicate matters further, the indigenous peoples of Tasmania were obliged into subservience or exile in order to make way for this Georgian-era Lebensraum (a history explored this April in A Tasmanian Requiem, a remarkable new oratorio for brass and voice created by a group of indigenous and non-indigenous musicians, artists, librettists, and composer Helen Thomson).Likewise, any prison or penal settlement that takes its reason for existing to the logical extreme – total control over its population, elimination of ordinary norms and decencies, abolishment of even minimal kindnesses – creates the conditions for a paradoxical freedom. In The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel of Gulag life, an imprisoned engineer named Bobynin observes that ‘you are strong only as long as you don’t deprive people of everything. For a person you’ve taken everything from is no longer in your power. He’s free all over again.’And once we start looking more critically at the supposedly free society around us, questions must be asked about the degree to which we actually wish to be liberated. Why are men born free, asked Rousseau, famously, but nevertheless everywhere in chains? Less famous was the Catholic Royalist Joseph de Maistre’s rejoinder. He said this was like asking ‘why sheep, who are born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibble grass?’ He believed that there were as many people who genuinely craved freedom as there were fish that flew. Finally, the question must be do freedom and autonomy even exist in our rich Western societies for those few who do wish to enjoy them to the full? Anyone watching events in recent months in relation to Facebook and other Silicon Valley behemoths might wonder whether we live ins...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Island Magazine, #153. To get started finding Island Magazine, #153, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

Pages: 114

Format: PDF, EPUB & Kindle Edition

Publisher: Island Magazine Inc

Release: 2018

ISBN: 0648271919

Description: "Years ago, during another life as a dealer in rare books and manuscripts, I bought a copy of a Beckett play at auction. It was the ugliest book that has ever passed through my a paperback, seventeenth edition, covers torn, pages crumpled and scribbled over. Its busted spine was brutally reinforced with silver duct tape. And yet this book was special. It was the prompt copy of the San Quentin Players’ performance of Samuel Beckett’s 'Endgame', which took place in the old gallows room of the infamous jail.Beckett was appalled by incarceration. He expressed a lifelong curiosity and compassion for those trapped inside the penal system. Living across from the La Santé Prison in Paris, Beckett would sometimes communicate with the inmates using a mirror and semaphore. Later on, he would direct performances of his own plays using former convicts as actors, or else assist them to direct in his place. Most famously he befriended and made a colleague of Rick Cluchey, the man whose copy of 'Endgame' I bought that day at Sotheby’s.Cluchey first heard 'Waiting for Godot' performed at San Quentin in 1957, where he was serving a life sentence for armed robbery (I say ‘heard’ because he did not attend the performance; he listened to it through the bars of his cell) and it is not too dramatic to say that this encounter with Beckett’s play changed his life. Here was a work of art that communicated something of the cruelty and absurdity, the slow violence of imprisonment. After his sentence was commuted in the mid-1960s, Cluchey spent the rest of his life performing Beckett, attempting to transmit something of the power of art to critique the system of surveillance, control and punishment he had known from within.This winter, Dark Mofo and the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery are set to explore similar territory in a new exhibition, guest curated by Swiss curator Barbara Polla, with Olivier Varenne and Mary Knights. A Journey to Freedom – which draws together works by contemporary national and international artists working across installation, sculpture, video, photography and virtual reality – ‘explores issues relating to incarceration from a range of different cultural and historical from Tasmania’s dark convict past; to ‘doing time’ in the notorious “Pink Palace” Risdon Prison; and the experience of refugees held in camps and detention centres in Australia and beyond.’This issue of Island has been shaped in part to fit with this ambitious project. It is a rich subject for literary responses – and Tasmania, founded as a prison island after all, is a rich location for thinking through its implications. But as the contributions to this issue reveal, once we begin to explore ideas of imprisonment and freedom, official categories and received wisdom begin to break down. Van Diemen’s Land began as a penal colony with a reputation for unrelenting misery at the end of the world. Yet economic development (based in no small part on the cheap labour afforded free settlers by earlier waves of convicts) gradually altered the transportation came to be seen as almost an opportunity – for improvement, renewal, a fresh start. To complicate matters further, the indigenous peoples of Tasmania were obliged into subservience or exile in order to make way for this Georgian-era Lebensraum (a history explored this April in A Tasmanian Requiem, a remarkable new oratorio for brass and voice created by a group of indigenous and non-indigenous musicians, artists, librettists, and composer Helen Thomson).Likewise, any prison or penal settlement that takes its reason for existing to the logical extreme – total control over its population, elimination of ordinary norms and decencies, abolishment of even minimal kindnesses – creates the conditions for a paradoxical freedom. In The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s novel of Gulag life, an imprisoned engineer named Bobynin observes that ‘you are strong only as long as you don’t deprive people of everything. For a person you’ve taken everything from is no longer in your power. He’s free all over again.’And once we start looking more critically at the supposedly free society around us, questions must be asked about the degree to which we actually wish to be liberated. Why are men born free, asked Rousseau, famously, but nevertheless everywhere in chains? Less famous was the Catholic Royalist Joseph de Maistre’s rejoinder. He said this was like asking ‘why sheep, who are born carnivorous, nevertheless everywhere nibble grass?’ He believed that there were as many people who genuinely craved freedom as there were fish that flew. Finally, the question must be do freedom and autonomy even exist in our rich Western societies for those few who do wish to enjoy them to the full? Anyone watching events in recent months in relation to Facebook and other Silicon Valley behemoths might wonder whether we live ins...We have made it easy for you to find a PDF Ebooks without any digging. And by having access to our ebooks online or by storing it on your computer, you have convenient answers with Island Magazine, #153. To get started finding Island Magazine, #153, you are right to find our website which has a comprehensive collection of manuals listed.
Our library is the biggest of these that have literally hundreds of thousands of different products represented.

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Island Magazine, #153

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