Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemCircuit Selects: Animation. Tessa Laird on Jill Kennedy, One Minute Enlightenment(Circuit, 2022)This very short essay describes the short film One Minute Enlightenment while bringing to bear relevant theoretical connections such as Jacques Derrida’s essay about how he felt when his cat saw him naked, “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”, compared with Carolee Schneemann who filmed herself having sex with her human partner in front of her cat Kitch, Fuses, 1965. Kennedy’s film also recalls moments in Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue (2013) which I have written about at length in “From Underdog to Overview: Perspectivism, Symbolism and Taxonomies in the films of Camille Henrot”, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, #42. There is also a nod to the proto-psychedelic cats of Victorian artist Louis Wain.
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ItemThe Congress Woman(Artspace, Auckland, 2021)This short text places Ann Shelton’s The Congresswoman in the context of her ongoing series jane says in which ikebana-inspired floral arrangements are photographed against eye-popping colours. These botanical portraits may be ravishingly retro chic, but they hold secrets – symbolic languages which can be read like code. Shelton’s artfully gathered plants possess medicinal qualities and speak to herstories of other artful gathering, by herbalists, wise women, and witches. Here, the “Dinner Plate Peony”, is an acknowledgement of Judy Chicago’s epic The Dinner Party (1979), while the mini-series which includes The Congresswoman and two other peony works, The Three Sisters, takes its title from the First Nations agriculture of Turtle Island. Pottawatomi botanist Robin Kimmerer sees the Three Sisters as a metaphor for “an emerging relationship between indigenous knowledge and Western science”. Through Shelton’s rose-tinted lens, we see the many shades of feminism as complementary rather than antagonistic.
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Itemwrapped in flowers, listening to frogs(Art + Australia, 2021)Multinaturalism proposes ways in which contemporary artists, writers and thinkers are doing the urgent work of decentring the human. Yet, if multinaturalism posits all of nature to be human, isn’t it just another form of anthropocentrism? We consider the risks of ‘strategic anthropomorphism’; before Descartes declared that animals were mere automata without soul, and Western scientific paradigms favouring separation over relation invaded every corner of the globe, animals, plants, rocks, winds and waters were ascribed human-like capacities. In an animate world, where everything has the ability to think and feel, decisions about who to eat and where to excrete are made with a good deal of consideration. Poetry erupts from every crevice of Multinaturalism. Writers are compelled towards a kind of song in an effort to connect with life forces that surpass quotidian speech. How we use language is crucial, for ‘It matters what stories tell stories’. Robin Wall Kimmerer talks of the difficulty of learning her native Potawatomi because what we consider in the West to be nouns (inert objects) are verbs in her mother tongue, entities in a constant state of relational becoming: ‘To be a hill, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive’. In such a lively, mobile and relational world, language must also be pliant enough to do justice to justice.
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ItemHoley (il)logic! Andrea Gardner’s nonsensical sense.(Sarjeant Gallery, Whanganui, New Zealand, 2022)This essay braids together two threads: playful ekphrastic descriptions of the colour photographic works of Andrea Gardner, and passages which respond to the works in terms of their context, whether that be biographical or theoretical. In responding to the various touchpoints of Gardner’s highly coloured, surreal photographic works, I discuss everything from Alice in Wonderland, to Van Gogh, to James Joyce, to Gilles Deleuze. Like the works themselves, the text reflects a “fall” into a kind of Wonderland of associations.
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ItemPretty Polyglot: Parrotisation as the Difference in Repetition(Art Monthly Australasia, 2021-12-20)Pretty polyglot: parrotization as the difference in repetition. In the hall of mirrors that is mimesis, Paul Carter suggests that parrots reflect our human propensity for mimicry. In Mimesis and Alterity, Michael Taussig writes of the colourful bodies of dead parrots being used in rituals where the mastery of a foreign language is desired. Mimesis longs to become other, and Carter notes that in the foundation stories of many cultures, parrots introduce and protect those key markers of difference: language and colour. While Jack Halberstam invokes Monty Python’s dead parrot as emblematic of our zombified relations with animals, artist Sergio Vega proposes “Parrot Theory” which sees “the rise of a global, postcolonial avant-garde forever changing the world into words, mirrors, and colours, as we speak...” For Vega, the days of the hierarchical and lonely eagle are over, and the era of the parrot has begun. He compares parrots to “flocks of immigrants from the warm regions of the world” who bring with them spices and colours, and are communal and communicative. Information technology has created a “parrotization of culture”: not banal chatter but a cultural commons. This paper proposes to investigate the parrot as emblem for preserving difference within relationality in a changing world.