Victorian College of the Arts - Research Publications
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ItemSounds of Unridden Waves and the Contemporary Sublime(The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2022-05-01)This article offers a speculative model intended to demonstrate that the sublime remains a viable construct in contemporary artworld contexts. Specifically, it proposes that sublimity and its neglected Other “profundity”—conceptualized as an irreducible pair—are well-suited to thinking about how to take seriously the still vital legacies bequeathed by postmodernism, while attempting to move beyond its more debilitating nihilistic and relativistic tendencies. First, somewhat neglected aspects of the Late Classical rhetorical heritage of the sublime are reviewed. Second, a model is progressively developed, building upon a formulation of human discourse articulated by Paul Ricoeur, and then introducing ideas relating to irresolvable self-contradiction and dialogical processes, as found in the thought of Western philosophers, such as Hegel, and in a number of Eastern philosophies, particularly Daoism. Finally, this model is applied to a brief discussion of an original moving image artwork by the authors, Sounds of Unridden Waves, published in a previous issue of the Journal of Asia-Pacific Popular Culture (2021).
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Item168° 58’ 37” W: A Cold War Memorial(Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne, 2018)This text is a material conduit, or vehicular medium, through which to imagine a work of art located on a stretch of intermittently frozen sea ice in the Bering Strait, at 168° 58’ 37” W. This ‘work’ is offered as a memor- ialisation of the consequences of collectively imagined fear—in this case the Cold War. Its ephemeral material existence—somewhere between this page and an expanse of sea ice located elsewhere in space and time— also seeks to perform something of the mutual insufficiency of material and contextual elements in artistic expression more generally.
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ItemProject Anywhere: Problems of Representation and Evaluation(Society of Artistic Research, 2017)Artistic research, like the world of a work of art, is presented in multiple ways in its often-uneven passage from conception through production to dissemination. And like a work of art, it can manifest across a complex distribution of materialisations. This complexity invariably presents challenges. Given the indeterminate nature and material manifestations that might constitute a single project, it can be particularly difficult to determine how and when it is best represented. This state of affairs can invite the question: are there more or less appropriate moments in the passage from conception to “realisation” in which to evaluate and represent artistic research? Although most established models tend to focus upon evaluating a project at its perceived point of realisation or conclusion (documentation/experience), Project Anywhere’s focus is instead directed toward the task of evaluating and representing artistic research at the proposal stage (speculation). Significantly, Project Anywhere regards a project’s potential produce new knowledge as something that might indeed. exist in its imagined or hypothetical potential rather than any tangible or measurable outcome. Moreover, by removing direct aesthetic experience as an evaluative mode, a very different sense of a new knowledge capacity is potentially introduced.
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ItemSounds of Unridden Waves and the Aesthetics of Late Romanticism: A Photo-Essay(The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2021)A deep sense of human interconnectedness with the ocean extends across history. The desire to communicate often-ineffable feelings about the ocean has inspired a diverse range of artistic responses to its moods, textures, and melancholic dimensions. In this speculative photo-essay, we present a series of images associated with a transmedial postconceptual artistic project titled Sounds of Unridden Waves. At its core, this project comprises a feature-length surf film (2021, forthcoming), without any human surfers, and an original instrumental soundtrack. In this essay, we draw inspiration from the late Romantic era to offer an alternate imagining of the project. We present images from the film’s working archive and elsewhere, juxtaposed against a sequence of historical quotations from selected artists, writers, and poets, each of whom is responding to themes such as oceanic awe, seaside locations, and formal or spiritual meditations upon relationships between nature and abstraction in art.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableParatext and the world of a work in public space: Eisenbach and Mansur’s Placeholders(Unlikely Publishing, La Trobe University and Victorian College of the Arts and Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne, 2016)