School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemAbstract art and Fascism in Como( 2003)During the 20th century abstract art was often connected with radical politics, most famously in the work of the Russian Constructivists. Although few would argue today that there is an inherent connection between abstract art and left-wing opposition, there is little awareness of how abstract art could be complicit with fascism, as happened during the 1930s in Italy. This lack of awareness can be partly credited to the role that Italian artists and historians have played in suppressing this complicity by publishing altered documents in exhibition catalogues. ‘Abstract Art and Fascism in Como’ will focus on a series of murals produced by Mario Radice (1898 – 1987) for Como’s Fascist Headquarters in 1936. A discussion of the role played by these murals in the propagandistic function of the building will give rise to a number of historiographical questions: Given the complicity of abstraction and fascism in this instance, as opposed to the more common association between abstract art and left-wing politics, should we assume that abstraction is politically neutral, an empty vessel for the inscription of ideology? Although there is an ethical obligation not to distort the historical record, are historians always obliged to read such works through a political lens? Or are there conditions under which such works might be understood to transcend their immediate political context?
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ItemLucio Fontana: the post-Fascist masculine figure( 2005)The ‘cut’ paintings of the Italian artist Lucio Fontana (1899 – 1968) are intensely sexual objects. For many viewers, their rawly coloured surfaces ruptured by deep vertical gashes strongly evoke female genitalia. Fontana’s violent cutting of the canvas has also been compared to the muscular gestures of male ‘action’ painters such as Jackson Pollock. What such interpretations fail to grasp, however, is the critique of gender identity, and in particular masculine identity, at the heart of Fontana’s work. However, as I will show, Fontana relied on an inversion of diametrically opposed notions of maleness and femaleness rather than any deconstruction of the opposition itself. As I outline in my paper, Fontana’s critique first emerges in the artist’s depictions of the male body immediately after Italy’s military defeat in WWII. Fontana’s limp and mangled clay warriors splashed with oozing layers of reflective glaze directly challenge the hard, ballistic ideal of the masculine body theorized in the proto-fascist writings of the Italian Futurist poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti. Drawing on the work of Hal Foster and Jeffrey Schnapp on the representation of fascist masculinity, I argue that Fontana developed an alternative model of maleness to that encountered in the official culture of Mussolini’s Italy. Accordingly, as I also demonstrate, his work gives insight into the extraordinary transformations in male body imagery that took place in avant-garde and official cultural circles in Italy during the first half of the 20th century.
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ItemCybertime: ontologies of digital perception( 2000)Although much work in digital cultures alights on the concept of space as a medium for orientation in narrative productions, the structuring of time is now an urgent object of study for cybercrtitics, as indeed it has been for philosophers and social scientists (Virilio, Lash, Osborne inter alia) in recent years. The problems confronted include those of the divorce between space and time as a prioris of Kantian and subsequent philosophies, the nature of time as datum, and the social theorisation of time as construct. The paper will argue that temporality has become a raw material for digital production, as much as luminance or narrativity, and that the malleability of time has produced both new closures and new openings for creative work in new media.
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ItemDigital landscape and nature-morte( 2006)Susan Collins' Glenlandia (and its immediate predecessor Fenlandia) employs a webcam on location feeding a plasma screen with a resolution of 320 x 240. The pixels arrive at one per second. It takes 76,800 seconds to complete an image, 21.33 hours, just under a day. Chances are that there will be a dark area of night (though Collins reports instances of a smear of moon across a night-time sky) and inexplicable artefacts, pixels of intense and unexpected colours appearing day or night, perhaps starlight or some unwitting creature flitting across the field of view. Hovering between photograph and moving image, the slow accrual of image, the slow erasure of the previous picture, make this in some interesting ways exemplary of the capacities of digital media, in particular some aspects of referentiality, and most specifically, in the first instance, the question of the representation of time.
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ItemThe Grainger Museum as a museum of its time(University of Sydney and Australian Museum Audience Research Centre, 2002)The Grainger Museum at the University of Melbourne was conceived in the 1920s and built in the 1930s by the Australian pianist, composer, conductor, teacher and folklorist Percy Aldridge Grainger (1882-1961). It is unusual in being an autobiographical museum and archive, in which are deposited the records and artefacts of the considerable and varied life’s work of this versatile and energetic creative person.Much has been written on the Grainger Museum and on Percy Grainger himself; his beliefs on a range of subjects and his considerable musical achievements. Most of the writings on the Museum examine it as a manifestation of Grainger’s creativity and eccentricity. While this is a valid approach, less consideration has been given to the museum in the context of museums generally during Grainger’s lifetime. Nor has Grainger’s strong urge to collect and preserve been examined in the light of the considerable recent literature on collecting and its motivations.Much has also been written on the history of museums, particularly the great expansion in museums in Europe and its colonies and North America in the nineteenth century. Less attention has been paid to the development of museums in the first half of the twentieth century. In placing the Grainger museum in a contemporary museological context, therefore, my PhD thesis will examine developments in museums during the approximate period in which he worked on this project—particularly between the first and second world wars. In order to put Grainger’s museum in this broader context it is also necessary to put Grainger’s beliefs into their contemporary context. Many of his enthusiasms—racial purity, language reform, Australian boosterism—were more widespread than has been generally acknowledged in previous Grainger scholarship.
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ItemImpact of optical crosstalk in fibre-radio systems incorporating WDM(IEEE, 2000)We investigate analytically and experimentally optical crosstalk effects in fibre-radio, systems incorporating wavelength-division multiplexing. Both in-band and out-of-band crosstalk are considered and the effect of the RF phase difference between the desired and crosstalk channels investigated. It is found that in-band incoherent crosstalk-induced power penalties are less severe than in conventional baseband transmission.
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ItemCitizenship and consumption: Convergence culture, transmedia narratives and the digital divide(RMIT University, 2008)
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ItemRhythms of gaming bodies: The grotesque ecology of the videogamer(RMIT University, 2008)
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ItemVedere la musica: painting and music in renaissance Venice(Bruno Mondadori, 2006)
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ItemReading the Medieval Book in an Exhibition(Macmillan Art Publishing, Macmillan Publishers Australia, 2009)