Bland On Bland – Blue Things

The theme for this week’s JVG Radio Method poem is “Blue Things
“.

A combined poem and prose piece was my eventual response to this weeks theme.
I was thinking about how some weeks people will ring up or send an email about the week’s poem and other weeks there won’t be anything

Its very curious

Anyway, have a listen to how it went below…

To play this poem directly in your browser – just click the “play” button below:

Blue Things

Blue Things

What mystery guides the artist’s hand?
The need to share, to understand?

Devotion, beauty; hope, dejection
Divine dwells in imperfection

The sinner’s angst; the virgin’s blush
Life’s essence channelled through the brush

Love, immortal: time, suspended
The artist’s gift as God intended

Nature’s order in all its glory
What is art if not a story?

The middle aged couple shuffled quietly through the gallery, their attire conservative; stylish without flair; more befitting church on Sunday than this temple of imagination.

Thousands of years stretched, framed and hung together like a mass crucifixion.

She, gazed lovingly at old favourites; he, driven by politics and controversy, had eyes for only one.

The infamous new acquisition
$1.3 million dollars; a comfortable middle class home in the suburbs today perhaps; the GDP of a developing nation in 1973.

He stood silently before the canvas, the random explosion of vibrant colour contrasting the perfect order and conformity of his blue pinstripe suit.

His head tilted to the left, then to the right.
He took two steps forward and allowed his glasses to slide to the end of his nose.
He took two steps back, one hand on hip, the other stroking his chin.
It could have been a dance routine from the recently opened Rocky Horror Show.

In this work, this profane visual orgy, he found all he had hoped for and more.

Proof of Labour’s fiscal incompetence.
Proof of how low art had sunk.
Proof Abstract Expressionism was no more than a cynical marketing euphemism for chaos.

The new Dark Age driven by talentless pretenders and their enablers, fawning acolytes administering the galleries, funded as always, by the tax payer.
As big a waste of money as the recently opened Sydney Opera House.
1973 was a very big year for recently openeds.

In a voice pretended for his wife and intended for everyone in the gallery he yelled “Blue Poles? More like Bleeding Piles

If our cat coughed that up I’d have the poor thing put to sleep”

Embarrassed, his wife ushered him from the room, with a look suggesting her husband risked the same fate as the cat.

A reactionary bringing anarchy to disorder, only to retreat in disarray – I imagine Pollock would have been well pleased.

Disquiet, expression, exploration, abstraction
What is art unless it incites reaction?

© Copyright 2019 Ian Bland

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Also have a listen to “Everything or Nothing”