School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemEditorial introduction: A creative life( 2006)In seeking authors who might address the relationship between the notions of philosophy and of creativity, the call for papers for this special issue of Angelaki invited consideration of the physical terms of each of these pursuits – philosophy and creative invention. The daily praxes of individual authorial and artistic pursuits are what have drawn us close to these selected texts. Individual authors’ obsessions and obsessive interests highlight the immense variation in how aesthetics operates as a determinant mode for those individuals and the communities with which they choose to engage.
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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.
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ItemMore-and-less-than: liveness, video recording, and the future of performance( 2000)With the spread of digital and other modes of electronic recordings into auditoria and lecture theatres where performance is studied, the debate about the video documentation of performance – already well rehearsed and in the pages of NTQ – is about to intensify. Rachel Fensham and Denise Varney have based the article which follows on their own work in videoing live theatre pieces for research into feminist performance. This article deliberates on their experience with the medium and examines the anxieties that surface at the point of implosion between live and mediatized performance. This first part locates these anxieties in the question of presence and absence in performance – especially that of the performer, whose body and self are both at stake in the recorded image. In the second part, the authors offer a description of viewing practices, which they present as a model of ‘videocy’.
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ItemPlatonic meditations: the work of Alain Badiou( 2001)The work of Alain Badiou is still almost unknown in English-speaking countries, if now almost unavoidable on the continent itself. Following the publication of his magnum opus, L’être et l’événement, in 1988, Badiou has continued to elaborte a philosophy which rejects the still-dominant post-Heideggerean belief that the era of Western metaphysics is effectively over.
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ItemCarpaccio, Saint Stephen, and the topography of Jerusalem( 1984)Those buildings and topographical motifs in Jerusalem represented by Carpaccio in his Saint Stephen cycle are discussed, as are the ways in which they were represented by artists before Carpaccio. It can be deduced that Carpaccio's sole source for his renderings was in the woodcuts by Reuwich in the 1486 book by Breydenbach on the Holy Land. Suggestions of other sources and of a visit by Carpaccio may be discarded. Conclusions can be drawn about Carpaccio's approach to the representation of real landscape.
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ItemPiranesi, Juvarra, and the triumphal bridge tradition( 2003)This article examines the idea of the triumphal bridge from the Renaissance to Piranesi, by way of Flavio Biondo, Onofrio Panvinio, Pirro Ligorio, Nicolas Poussin, Fischer von Erlach, and Filippo Juvarra, in order to explore attitudes toward the reception and representation of ancient architecture. It shows how the eighteenth-century theme of the "magnificent (triumphal) bridge" had its roots in topographical inquiry and examines the contribution that Piranesi's interest in the archaeological problem of the triumphal bridge made to the creative process that resulted in the "Ichnographia", the large map of the ancient Campus Martius in his 1762 "Campo Marzio".
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ItemThe Jew's two noses: Freud, cocaine, addiction( 2001)Recently there have been a number of authorities who - from the inside of psychoanalysis itself - have suggested that the most forceful threat to psychoanalysis as a clinical practice is the present efflorescence and dominance of drug-based psychotherapies. Indeed, the astonishing public success of a physician such as Oliver Sacks - whose entire career would have been impossible without his illegal pharmaceutical experimentation upon uniformed patients in the guise of authentic Hippocratic care - can stand as a particularly chilling index of just such a crisis: the case study, a genre which Freud is often said to have invented, and to which he certainly gave the decisive impetus, has become in Sacks’ hands an unreflective celebration of the radiant sovereign power that legal access to, and distribution rights over, synthesized psychoactive substances can bequeath to the duly-authorised representatives of the pharmaco-medical institution. Sacks aside, John Forrester characterizes this shift thus ;the introduction of the psychotropic drugs in the 1950s, a new generation of tranquilizers shortly after (Librium, Valium), the anti-depressants of the 1960s and 1970s, and the mood-altering drugs of the 1980s, has entailed a significant shift in the practice of psychiatry. Yes, the new psychiatry went hand in hand with a shift of theoretical focus from psychological and psychoanalytical theories to neurological and psychopharmacological concerns’. His analysis has been echoed by other major psychoanalytic theorist-practitioners, such as Bruce Fink, Elie Ragland and Elisabeth Roudinesco, all of whom naturally deplore this situation, even if their condemnations take different forms, and identify different causes.
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ItemMuscles, hybrids and new bad futures( 1994)Since Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone made their respective debuts onto the cinematic screen the muscle phenomenon has become a dominant factor in the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Muscle, in all its hard and sweaty glory, has found a market especially in the big budget extravaganzas whose narratives centre around the spectacle of the built bodies of male stars such as Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Lundgren, Van Damme, Snipes and Seagal, and the more padded forms of actors such as Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. This new brand of cinema whilst harking back in part to an American tradition of genre cinema (the Western, Detective films, War Films etc.) appears to owe more to genres that emerged outside America: the Italian `gladiator' pictures of the 1950s and 1960s which retold the adventures of Hercules and other mythic heroes via the forms of bodybuilding stars such as Steve Reeves and Reg Park; and the martial arts action films popularized by Hong Kong Cinema and which found a very profitable market in the West ‐ and which also saw the migration of the genre into American cinema starring a series of martial arts experts including Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee and Jean‐Claude van Damme. Both genres revealed an unabashed display of the spectacle of action and the spectacle of the male body in action. The camera found any excuse to unapolegetically caress the bodies of the stars with pans, tracks and close‐ups of various fragmented body parts in ways that always denoted strength, agility and power.
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ItemDoppelgangers and the third force: the artistic collaborations of Gilbert & George and Marina Abramovic/Ulay( 2000)Gilbert & George’s and Marina Abramovic/Ulay’s actions of the 1970s were collaborations that blurred and doubled the “normal” figure of the artist as an individual body. This type of collaboration had the properties of a third identity, but did the new identity resemble a third hand, a doppelganger (an apparition associated with death, sometimes experienced historically as a shadow or as the double of a living person), or a phantom extension of the artists’ joint will, rather like a phantom limb? The nature of this modified artist is important, for it represents a strategy to convince the audience of new understandings of artistic identity. In this regard, these 1970s actions now seem absolutely prescient with respect to art in the late 1990s, in which so many artists absented themselves from the position of either author or maker. The believability of Gilbert & George’s action, The Singing Sculpture (1969-73), was linked to their manipulation of absorption and theatricality, the qualities Michael Fried theorized in his influential study of Denis Diderot’s bourgeois milieu in eighteenth-century Paris. Gilbert & George were emphasizing a physical and mental discontinuity between artists and their beholders. The idea of art that encodes personal absence and misplaced identity, of going away and leaving markers or traces of that departure, is far from new and has at least one clear artistic precedent from a much earlier period - the Enlightenment. It had been theorized, for example, in a completely different context, that of Denis Diderot’s 1767 essays on the landscape painter Claude-Joseph Vernet. In his celebrated “Salon” of 1767, Diderot imagined himself stepping into and taking country walks in Verner’s landscapes. To recapitulate Fried’s elaborations of Diderot’s theories, this imagining was prompted by Diderot’s proposal that the spectator of a painting must be free and active, not just a passive consumer, and conversely that the painting itself should seem to be an impassive object in nature and not appear to be asking to be looked at. Diderot was arguing for two ideas: The beholder has an active place and role in the work of art, and the work of art can be a place in which the artist or the viewer could “go for a walk” and mentally move around within the picture-space. The resulting artistic preference for the painter’s self-effacement and depersonalization represented a departure from previous Rococo ideas of theatrical self-presentation and the spectator’s appreciation of such theatricality. Mental travel was part of the process of dissociation in a special case of absorption - the pastoral - in which the disembodied spectator became a visually active phantom participant in the work itself.