School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemExplorations in creative writing(Melbourne University Press, 2003)
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ItemPutting the “art” back into arts policy making: how arts policy has been “captured” by the economists and the marketers(Taylor and Francis Group, 2003-03-01)This paper explores the current discourse about arts policy and funding and its placement within an economic paradigm. The models of “cultural industry” and “creative industry” are explored and how they affect arts funding discourse. Similarly the impact of the introduction of the language of industry and business to the arts sector is considered. If bottom-line arguments are used by funders, governments and critics to argue the merits or otherwise of arts activity, how does this affect arts practice? In recent times arts funding agencies have been restructured to reflect a market-driven agenda rather than an arts-driven agenda. The impact of all these issues is considered in the context of Australian arts' models in particular, but with reference to examples in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The paper concludes with suggestions for a reassertion of core cultural values in future discourse.
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ItemLiterature as regime (meditations on an emergence)(Manchester University Press, 2002)At the beginning of Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March a young infantry lieutenant, seeing the Emperor accidentally put himself in danger in the course of the battle of Solferino, pushes him to the ground and receives the bullet intended for the Supreme War Lord. Many years later, now a captain and ennobled, Joseph Trotta finds in his son’s school reader an account of this incident.
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Item'Race portraits' and vernacular possibilities: heritage and culture(Cambridge University Press, 2001)'Heritage' is a term both broad and slippery. Beyond the literal meaning of property passed between generations, its contemporary evocations include 'inherited customs, beliefs and institutions held in common by a nation or community . . . [and] natural and "built" landscapes, buildings and environments held in trust for future generations' (Davison et. al. 1998, p. 308). Even this elemental definition strongly associates cultural institutions and heritage. Most cultural institutions articulate inherited customs and beliefs through a sense of heritage which, in turn, certifies their authenticity and legitimacy. Parliamentary conventions, halls of fame and honour boards, much judicial ritual, the use of uniforms, anniversary commemorations of all sorts and university degree conferring ceremonies are strong examples of such practices. At the same time the more material and codified notion of heritage as things held in trust explicitly organises the work of many cultural institutions.
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ItemChained to their signs: remembering breastplates(Pluto Press, 2001)At first glance, breastplates might seem to be just another device in the technology of colonial capture in Australia. Take the photograph of Bilin Bilin wearing a plate inscribed 'Jackey Jackey - King of the Logan and Pimpama'. The plate, the chain and the conventions of photography produce a Yugambeh elder as a shackled criminal on display - he is both a primitive in tableau and one of 'the usual suspects'. The image seems to both document captivity and evoke those 'frontier photographs' of Aboriginal prisoners in the desert bound together with heavy chains attached to manacles around their necks. This initial impression is right in that it recognizes some of the ways in which colonial captivity is not only about actual imprisonment but equally about how captivity is understood, represented, interpreted and made historical. Still, in this chapter I want to persuade you that breastplates and photographs of breastplates performed other roles: as cross-cultural objects and signs.
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ItemCutting ordinary: an ABC true story( 2003)The 2002 Caroline Chisolm Lecture, Chisolm College, La Trobe University, 8th October 2002. I’m honoured and particularly pleased to return to La Trobe University to speak about ‘Ordinary People’. The last time I was invited to speak at this university I had just begun shooting Ordinary People and I spoke at the time about the film as an imagined object. Tonight I am going to speak about it as a lost object. There’s a repetition in play here which I rather like. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan said that repetition was a missed encounter with the real, and that is my subject: a missed encounter. The Australian journalist Peter Manning, who knew the history of cutting ‘Ordinary People’, said to me last year: ‘what is going to be unbearable for you is that when the film is released, it is going to receive a lot of critical acclaim and you’re going to be left standing in the sidelines saying, but –’. Manning’s comments have proved prescient. ‘Ordinary People’ screened on the ABC in March this year to critical acclaim. It has been selected for a number of local and international festivals, including Mumbai, The Real Life on Film Festival, and the inaugural Aus Fest, the Australian Digital and Video Film Festival. Before making Ordinary People I’d never held a camera, never done a film-making course and wasn’t even a surreptitious wannabe film-maker. Now I’ve made a film reaching an audience that my academic work will never see, I’ve been paid quite handsomely for it, and nobody has had a bad word to say about the film. So why would I want to jeopardise this almost mythical success by speaking against my own film? Because that’s what I want to do tonight: raise a series of ‘buts’ about the film you’ve just seen.
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ItemEmpire(Museum of Contemporary Art, 2002)Meridian’s importance lies not in the affirmation of the vitality of artists’ careers, nor in the demolition of the ‘next wave’ syndrome, nor even in the revelation of cross-generational continuity through a major exhibition of senior artists in a museum program usually dedicated to the new. Rather, it consists of the opportunity to test absence: that of emerging, not established, contemporary artists. If the present moment (the one represented by emerging artists) is on this occasion not on the museum’s walls, then it stalks the exhibition as its always-present doppelganger, like a transparent overlay. What do I mean? As I’ve noted before, the drive to rethink art is not the property of any one period, even one as productively unstable as the present. As we look at older artists’ work, we are able to see if younger artists are bound by genetic coding to return to conservative certainties, or if the productivist revolution of the early 1970s was a trajectory and a true sea change.
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ItemFrom the religious to the psychological sublime: the fate of Young's Night Thoughts in Blake's The Four Zoas(Locust Hill Press, 2002)Blake's 537 watercolor drawings to Young's Night Thoughts were produced between 1795 and 1797. He began work on The Four Zoas toward the end of this period, in 1796 or 1797. This temporal proximity, along with the profound formal and thematic influence of Night Thoughts on The Four Zoas, explains in part why the watercolors that illustrate the former frequently seem to allude to events detailed in the latter.
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ItemSeparating the men from the boys: gender representation and cross-dressing in the plays of Shakespeare( 2003)This paper was presented at a Melbourne Shakespeare Society meeting in August 2003. The written version aims to give readers an opportunity to read the talk as presented. The paper discusses the representation of female characters by boy actors in the age of Shakespeare.
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ItemRepresenting the Piazza del Quirinal in the reign of Clement XII: Panini's 'View of the Piazza del Quirinale'( 2002)By the eighteenth century some subjects for Roman view-paintings already had a long pictorial tradition, while others only came to prominence as a result of a site acquiring a new significance in the wake of papal building programs. One of the most important of these new subjects was the Piazza del Quirinale.