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(Informa UK Limited, 2003-03-01)
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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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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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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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ItemArchitectures of the senses: neo-baroque entertainment spectacles(MIT Press, 2003)It was sometime in November 2000. I was walking along an Arabian street, taking in the rhythms of the arabesque decorations and the spectacular, multi-colored buildings; being entertained by the exotic street musicians; and occasionally being lured into various bazaars that offered the temptations of products ranging from Persian rugs and glassware, to Versace gowns and DKNY accessories. At one point, I found myself at a pier. I looked up at the sky and, while soft, fluffy clouds punctured its blue (yet somewhat solid) surface, it seemed like it was going to be a beautiful day. But what do I know? No sooner had I thought this than the rumbling sounds of thunder vibrated through the air and flashes of lightning lit up the now-transformed dark and ominous clouds. And the rain came pouring down, creating restless ripples in the previously still waters near the pier. So I left Arabia and walked across the road to Lake Como, where I took in the sights of the palazzo Bellagio as it stood majestically in the background. Initially, the enormous lake reflected the palazzo in its tranquil waters, then thousands of small tubes began to puncture its surface, and the first bars of music suddenly filled this vast space. I recognized the tune Frank Sinatra's "Lady Luck" - and it was, indeed, a toe-tapper. As hundreds flocked around balconies overlooking the lake, the lake's water began to magically take on a life of its own: spurts of water swayed left and right, back and forth in perfect unison with the rhythms of Sinatra's crooning. And the audience continued to look on, mesmerized by the spectacle they witnessed, astounded by the rhythmic motions of water, which included stretches of up to fifty meters erupting to heights that exceeded one hundred meters.
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ItemNetwork Time and the New Knowledge Epoch(Sage Publications, 2003)This article analyses the temporal dimensions of knowledge production. Specifically it discusses the mechanics of the process and how these have changed through what are termed ‘knowledge epochs’. It argues that with the widespread dissemination of clock-time through the Industrial Revolution, the production of knowledge was significantly shaped by the temporality of the clock. Through the convergence of neoliberal globalization and ICT revolution a new powerful temporality has emerged through which knowledge production is refracted: network time. The article concludes that the spread of network time into the realm of the everyday has profound implications for the production of critical and reflexive knowledge in contemporary culture and society.
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ItemThe MIT Media Lab: techno dream factory or alienation as a way of life?( 2003)This article critically analyses the work and the ethos of the MIT Media Lab in the context of globalizing capital and the ICT revolution. It argues that the Media Lab owes its tremendous success in part to the public relations strategies of its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, and to the very real need for the Lab's products to 'fill in the gaps' left by the broad and irregular dynamics of globalization and the ICT revolution. The Media Lab and its research products insert information technologies into the interstices of cultural, social and temporal life, stitching together an 'informational ecology' of interconnectivity. This ecology has its own temporality, a synchronized 'chronoscopic' temporality or real-time duration that obliterates the many other temporalities that interpenetrate our lives and give them meaning. It is argued the 'informational ecology' of interconnectivity constructed by the Media Lab and many other emulative 'start-ups', lead not to a world of 'diversity' as Negropontean philosophy insists, but a one-dimensional world of alienation.
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ItemWhite-out: theatre as an agent of border patrol( 2003)In Australia in 2001, there was a marked escalation of debates about nation, national identity and national borders in tandem with a right-wing turn in national politics. Within the cultural context of debate about national identity, popular theatre became an unwitting ally of neo-conservative forces. Within popular theatre culture, the neo-conservative trend is naturalized as the view of the Anglo-Celtic-European mainstream or core culture that also embraces and depoliticizes feminist debates about home and family. Elizabeth Coleman’s 2001 play This Way Up assists in the production of an inward-looking turn in the national imaginary and a renewed emphasis on home and family. The performance dramatizes aspects of what we are to understand as ordinary Australian life which might be interpreted as that which Prime Minister John Howard defends in the name of the National Interest. The cultural imaginary that shapes the production of the popular play is that of the conservative white national imaginary.
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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?