School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemUNESCO Cultural Heritage Sites and Tourism: A paradoxical relationship(Routledge, 2020)Conservation and management of cultural heritage sites are characterised by several paradoxes, which also affect the tourism activities related to these sites. The World Monument Fund monitors damage to heritage buildings and sites. It identifies three major threats facing heritage sites: political conflict, climate change and tourism. The tourist is thus seen to be as damaging as war or rising sea levels. In the World Monument Fund’s (2018) list of the most endangered 25 monuments in the world, approximately one-third were diagnosed as being ‘in danger’, mainly from tourists.
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ItemArts, Culture and Country(Currency House, 2022)The past two years have been a particularly dark time for the arts in Australia. Not only are we living through a pandemic, but the federal government has shown little interest in—or understanding of—the plight of the sector and its artists. The pandemic comes on the back of seven years of continuous erosion of public assistance to the arts at the national level, with more than ninety arts organisations defunded, while funding to individual artists has been significantly reduced. Many are struggling to survive in the face of repeated lockdowns and border closures to control the pandemic. For years the arts sector has provided evidence of its economic benefits, as well as its intrinsic value to society. Yet politicians remain impervious to these arguments. Increasingly, it is ideology rather than evidence that determines government policy. In other words, support for the arts is not primarily a question of economics. It is a question of values. The pandemic has made people realise the seminal importance of the arts and culture to our national well-being, but politicians do not see them as a central part of policymaking. Arts and culture are intertwined. We need to change how we view the relationship between the two within the political framework. This monograph presents some ideas on how to do it.
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ItemVoyaging in the Pacific(Oxford University Press, 2024)This chapter examines three major works published over a span of almost five decades: John Hawkesworth’s An Account of the voyages . . . for making Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (1773), George Keate’s Account of the Pelew Islands (1788), and Dr John Martin’s Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands in the South Pacific Ocean (1817). The ‘authors’ named here were not authors but editors, professional literary men who edited, rearranged, compiled, and often embellished the journals, logbooks, and charts of the original travellers. My aim is to see how each of these editors produced the experience of travel textually for Romantic metropolitan audiences. Hawkesworth, the best known, edited the first of James Cook’s three voyages, drawing principally on the journals of Cook and the naturalist Joseph Banks. Keate, a friend of Voltaire, shaped the thirteen- week encounter between a shipwrecked British crew and the people of Palau, and Martin took charge of William Mariner’s tale of his four years on Tonga.
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ItemLocating Buzz and Liveness: The Role of Geoblocking and Co-presence in Virtual Film Festivals(Springer International Publishing, 2023)The sudden and near-complete move of festivals into the online space in 2020 complicated our understanding of the “there” and “then” involved in film festival participation. Experiencing festivals in lockdown (often from domestic spaces), “taking part” in these virtual events had the potential to dramatically expand the points of access. Although this approach was taken early with the YouTube-based We Are One global film festival, for the vast majority of single-festival-run online events access was limited to specific geographic areas through geoblocking technology. This chapter examines the function of geofenced access in virtual and hybrid virtual/real-world film festivals. It poses the question: what are the benefits for festivals in enforcing territoriality and place-boundedness in the de-territorialized world of online media? Looking to the importance of embodied co-presence and networked publics in existing understandings of liveness, buzz, and value creation at festivals, we interrogate the role of “place” in defining festival prestige and influence. We ask, if the mechanisms of value creation linked to the physical spectacle and viral spread of buzz at festivals are disrupted, will the film festival experience still be seen as valuable? And what might that mean for the future of festivals and their study?
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ItemThe Point is the Circle and the Circle is the Point(Buxton Contemporary, The University of Melbourne, 2023-04-14)Artist monograph
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ItemNo Preview AvailableExporting the Baroque(Hamilton Gallery, 2023)By the late seventeenth century, it is not unreasonable to speak of the baroque as a global visual idiom. European dynastic ambition, trade and missionary fervour saw baroque art carried across Asia and the Americas, where not only new markets for such art were created, but also important production centres, with non-European artists adapting European designs to indigenous materials and techniques, creating new and dynamic expressions of the baroque.
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ItemSurrealism's Anti-Bildungsroman(Cambridge University Press, 2023)This essay traces the anti-Bildungsroman tradition under the influence of surrealism, in Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (1928) and Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations (1982). While Acker inherits Bataille’s fascination with violence and transgression, these themes are formally developed through the prism of punk and feminist conceptual art and performance. The recent resurgence of critical interest in Acker’s work prompts us to further consider her relationship to surrealism and the modernist avant-garde. While Acker’s homage to Bataille in the early novels signals a brazen ’theft’ of the male avant-garde tradition for feminist subversive ends, Great Expectations experiments with form and language in order to evacuate the Bildungsroman of its bourgeois (gendered) claims to moral authority and insight. While extreme experience in Bataille’s literary work holds out the promise of an affirmation of sorts, the excoriating emotional masochism of Acker’s characters tilts towards nihilism. And yet both Bataille and Acker draw on the Bildungsroman even as they decondition the humanist subject that lies at its very core, straining at the limits of language to represent the vertiginous intensity of affective life and the dissolution of desire into abjection.
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ItemThe Politics of Mestizaje in Contemporary Latin American Art(Heide Museum of Modern Art, 2023)This richly illustrated 120-page hardcover publication accompanies the stunning exhibition at Heide, showcasing a selection of significant works by contemporary Latin American and Australian artists. Featuring a curatorial overview by senior curator Melissa Keys, an essay by Dr Cristóbal Escobar Duenas, Lecturer in Screen Studies at The University of Melbourne, plus stunning installation views and a behind the scenes look into many of the artist’s studios, the publication explores the ways that art can take our imaginations beyond the limitations of the known world and the veil of visual appearances.
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ItemCapturing ambient participation: Indian Independence Day at Federation Square(Routledge, 2020)This chapter uses the concept of ambience as an analytical tool to explore the qualities of cultural participation in the outdoor public spaces of contemporary cultural precincts, and as a metaphor that speaks to a wider process of cultural transformation in communicative cities. Media-rich cultural precincts are now a common feature of urban developments and inform the major policy shifts in creativity-led urban regeneration. The ambient experiences afforded by outdoor cultural precincts resonate with significant shifts in artistic practice. Ambient participation is particularly difficult to account for in the instrumental frameworks and methods routinely used by cultural funders and stakeholders to evaluate the impact of cultural infrastructure. Frameworks designed to measure visitation numbers at a museum, the satisfaction surveys of audiences, or the segmentation and brand recognition indicators tested by market research frame cultural participation as an aggregation of individual experiences. Media-saturated environments make qualitative changes to the experience of being-together-in-public.