School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemWriting places: whiteness and the design of the built environment( 2018)The design of the built environment affects people. In Australia, designed spaces reflect specific ideas about nationhood that do not represent the reality of a diverse population. Instead, a white national identity pervades with unresolved issues of land often at the heart of such identity narratives. Whiteness, understood as a specific power structure, operates through landscapes and architecture in explicit and implicit ways. Indigenous cultural identities are also present within and against all of these expressions of whiteness. Such tensions arise in the first instance due to manifestations of whiteness in designed spaces being situated in Indigenous lands and Country while colonial histories and their associated violence, both symbolic and literal, remain largely unacknowledged. This thesis uses a mixed methodology to investigate a range of spaces, including demarcated national spaces, memorial sites, and places of exhibition, through the lens of critical race and whiteness studies to reveal how these identity tensions occur. Though the Australian context is the main focus of the study, an initial look to how similar issues are playing out in the US highlights the existence of transnational whiteness and the nature of the newly-formed relationship between the two nations at the time of Australia’s Federation. It is argued that the complicated relationship between these cultural identities affects the way landscapes and architecture are experienced, whether this is realised on a conscious level or not. Further, by using critical and reflexive modes of engagement, designers can gain deeper insights into place, see and feel their position in relation to these identity tensions, and understand how power is operating through them. This examination of the way cultural identities such as whiteness and Indigeneity are expressed through the design of national, memorial and exhibition spaces, allows a way into thinking about how the same tensions and power dynamics may also be taking place in more everyday spaces.
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ItemGlobal positioning: international auctions and the development of the Western market for Chinese Contemporary art, 1998-2012( 2018)This thesis examines the role of international auction houses in developing a Western market for Chinese Contemporary art from 1998 to 2012. It highlights six art auction events as pivotal for the transmission of cultural and economic value from local contexts to global acceptance. This thesis underscores the agency of collectors, networked art mediators and auctions to influence market expansion in the West, thereby revealing auctions as creators and consecrators of symbolic and economic value of Chinese Contemporary art.
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ItemMaurice Blanchot: three terrors( 2018)This thesis studies the political and critical writings of Maurice Blanchot from 1933 to 1949, a period in which he underwent a number of fundamental intellectual changes that were most famously but not only political. Its overarching trope is that of the terror, which appears in three very different guises, in 1936, 1941, and 1947, playing a central role in Blanchot’s engagement each time. The terror is one of the major metaphorical complexes of twentieth century French letters. It is essentially a nested series of discourses (and medical and juridical metaphors) about how discourse connects to reality or only to itself, which makes it essentially reflexive, as well as immediately political, literary and philosophical. In it the twin heritages of revolution and Romanticism are repeatedly struggled over and re-worked into their modern forms. My thesis elaborates Blanchot’s reckonings with this complex as a means to demonstrating the precise nature of his various changes. The goal is not to explain his political ‘turn’ but to specify the categorical modifications to his thinking that it presupposes. I trace the increasing sophistication of Blanchot’s political and literary thinking, arguing that initially Blanchot’s national revolutionary politics are formally anti-Semitic in that the prerequisite for national restoration is the violent expurgation of what is foreign. It is only with his encounter with thinkers like Jean Paulhan and Brice Parain in the 1940s that he develops an account of how terror and rhetoric, or destruction and articulation, mediate but do not limit one another, and begins to conceive of literature as the sovereign creation-destruction of realities via their interaction. It is his encounter with Hegel that enables him to re-link this conception to history by arguing that it directly corresponds to revolution, a view founded on Hegel’s basic homology between language and history. I argue that Blanchot’s identification of himself with revolution, as well as his negative reading of Hegel (his refusal of ‘achieved’ sense and development generally), sets a kind of absolute positioning named ‘ambiguity’ from which Blanchot will endeavour to think henceforth: it leads directly to his tendency to proceed by the unfolding of paradoxes and to the inescapably plural meaning of his 1950s (anti-)categories such as the neuter. It also precludes the possibility of a fixed division between literature and the political, which I argue is sufficient grounds for ruling out modelling his turn on a transition from one to the other. Such a reading, which is more explicitly materialist than most of those proposed to date, provides a different basis from which to approach Blanchot’s celebrated 1950s critical writings: namely, that they are suffused with the absolute experience of the identity with literature and revolution that Blanchot ‘becomes’ in the late 1940s. It also implies that Blanchot was preoccupied with thinking the link between literature and history throughout his career, and that even the rarefied nature of some of his writings is due to this very issue and his responses to it, rather than to his indifference to such a link.
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ItemCollaborative drawing on Captain Cook's Endeavour voyage, 1768-1771: an intellectual history of artistic practice( 2018)This thesis investigates what can be learned from the drawn gesture on paper by locating it in the historical context in which it was made. This ‘contextualist’ approach to drawing analysis is derived from the methodologies used for text analysis in intellectual history. Intellectual historians recapture the meaning a text conveyed to its original readers by reconstructing the ‘language game’ of the author. The game has two dimensions in this approach: the concepts and practices that define the cultural norms of the author’s society and intellectual community, and might be described as the ‘rules of the game’, and the creative ‘moves’ made by individuals within these parameters as participants in a discourse with the author that constitute the game’s ‘play’. This thesis proposes to expand the field of intellectual history by incorporating the dimension of gesture into the moves of the language game to allow drawing and writing to be studied together. This gestural dimension of the linguistic move constitutes artistic practice in the terms of this thesis. The ramifications of its incorporation into the play of discourse are illustrated in a case study of the first part of Captain Cook’s Endeavour voyage of Pacific exploration from 1768 to 1771, the voyage to Tahiti to observe the transit of Venus. Part One, ‘Intellectual Parameters,’ constructs a model of Georgian civil society that provides the foundation for the linguistic context in which the expedition’s manuscripts of texts and drawings will be read in the chapters of the thesis. Part Two, ‘Drawing Practices,’ applies this model to develop a detailed picture of the expedition’s working community by reconstructing the artists’ drawing sessions in the Atlantic. Part Three, ‘Discourse,’ interprets the drawings of Tupaia, the man who joined Cook’s voyage to travel to England, and his discourse through the bridging languages of navigation and cartography with several members of the expedition, to produce a new reading of the Endeavour’s purpose of discovery in the South Pacific and Cook’s claims to possession.
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ItemMoving mountains: interwar collecting of French modernist art and the economics of translocation( 2018)A distinguishing feature of the Parisian art market during the interwar period was the influx of art collectors from outside continental Europe, who, in many cases, benefited from a currency advantage against the weakened French franc. These collectors expedited a large-scale translocation of French modernist artwork, the causes and consequences of which have been the subject of a range of recent publications and exhibitions. However, the significance of the underlying economic context surrounding this translocation remains less studied and poorly understood. This thesis draws on unpublished archival correspondence, gallery records and quantitative economic data to construct case studies of prominent interwar art collectors in France, Britain, America, Japan, Australia and Brazil. These case studies are thematically linked by two arguments: first, that the collapse in the value of the French franc, among other economic disruptions, played a significant role in the timing, scale and international dispersion of French modernist art; second, that foregrounding the underlying economic context provides a fresh insight into the importance of the newly assembled international collections, which are shown to have significantly influenced the reception of French modernist art in their respective locations. In substantiating these arguments, the thesis seeks to provide an alternative perspective within which the activities of interwar art collectors and the causes and consequences of the translocation of French modernist art can be further understood.
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ItemFielding Peter Carey: economy, archive, celebrity( 2018)This thesis accounts for a method of reading Carey’s fiction as works of national literature in the minor register (colonial, peripheral, small) which refract a sense of the possibility of circulation in transnational literary markets. The publication of Carey’s debut work, The Fat Man in History, by the University of Queensland Press in 1974 coincided with the termination of The Traditional Markets Agreement, which resulted in assisting American publishers to roam more freely in the Australian literary market. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of the literary field, capital, and habitus, my thesis starts by examining the publication of The Fat Man as a microevent to better understand the macroevent of Carey’s position-taking in the transnational marketplace. The mid-1970s shifted Carey’s position in the field and established a trajectory through which he accumulated significant cultural and economic capital in the following decades. This method interrogates Carey’s rising visibility in relation to the construction of a new status for the postcolonial authors and the possibilities of the global publishing industry since the 1960s throughout to the present moment, including the politics of literary prizes and literary festivals, the rise of literary agents, the commodification of literary archives, and the merging of conglomerate publishing houses. Carey’s fiction exhibits the anxieties of an Australian author ensnared in neoliberal systems of literary production and distribution, a free market economy biased against national territories (such as Australia) on the periphery of a world republic of letters. Drawing on the sociological paradigm of Pierre Bourdieu, this thesis asks how, and to what extent, can we think of Carey’s fiction and his writerly persona as cultural objects circulating within the global literary marketplace? How does his fiction refract the global forces that produce and distribute his books and celebrity? And what is the relationship between Carey’s stories and the literary marketplace, between the making of his books and the reading of them? Thus, my study offers a lateral examination of two interrelated aspects of Carey’s fiction. On the one hand, it captures a continuum of Australian and transnational practices of literary distinction and advancement that governed the critical and financial success of Carey’s fiction; on the other, it produces insights into the structural homologies between the literary spaces that Carey inhabits and those of his Australian characters confined to minor systems of cultural production and consumption.
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ItemThe politics of the night: feminine writing and mother-daughter relations in Djuna Barnes, Angela Carter, and Shahrnush Parsipur( 2018)This thesis uses Luce Irigaray’s philosophy of sexual difference and Maurice Blanchot’s orphic philosophy of literature to examine representations of night in the fiction of three women novelists, Djuna Barnes, Angela Carter and Shahrnush Parsipur. Performing a feminist psychoanalytical reading of Blanchot, I reveal the various ways in which his poststructuralist literary theory rests upon and reflects the phallocentric constitution of the symbolic whereby linguistic signification (the production of the literary work) depends upon the loss of the mother (Eurydice), and the nocturnal exteriority of maternal-female sexual difference. If literature is the impossible movement towards the darkness of maternal origin (the other night), then it is twice as impossible for the female author to move towards the prelinguistic night of maternal origin because of the incest taboo and the phallocentric relegation of maternal-female sexuality to the unconscious. Through a combination of feminist psychoanalysis and literary criticism, the thesis proposes that a feminine literary category marked by maternal-female sexuality is a near-impossibility. However, I go beyond a feminist appropriation of Blanchot’s concept of the other night in order to explain the political relevance of the author’s sex in writing. The thesis also has a comparative dimension because the night is a key concept in Persian literature and in Sufism. In so far as Parsipur’s imagery of the pre-Oedipal night takes on a mystical shape very different from that of Barnes and Carter, the thesis reveals the cultural formation of the unconscious across different socio-cultural geographies in world literature.
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ItemJanet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: spatial environments and experiments in sound( 2018)This thesis is the first scholarly monograph that comprehensively examines the work of contemporary Canadian artists Janet Cardiff (b. 1957) and George Bures Miller (b. 1960). It provides a detailed account of their sound and media installations, audio walks, and video walks between the late 1980s and 2014. This thesis asks: how may Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s artworks be investigated and understood as sound installations? The significant focus of my research is Cardiff and Miller’s emphasis on recorded sound, media, and experimentation that has defined their works since the late 1980s. I emphasize that sound design (the mixing, layering, and editing of sound) was pivotal to Cardiff and Miller creating their self-described “spatial environments.” These methods and technologies enabled Cardiff and Miller to confront and redefine existing trajectories of sound, video, and installation art within contemporary art. This in-depth study of Cardiff and Miller’s artwork contributes to the discursive category of sound and video installation. The wider contribution of this thesis to the field is to develop and explain how sound is exhibited and encountered as contemporary art.
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ItemSyncope: female absence from the social scape( 2018)ABSTRACT This thesis will present, for the first time, an historical analysis of representations of syncope, that is, its aesthetic forms in Western religious art, secular art, film, and most recently in advertising. It will explore images of syncope as they originated in mythological and religious art before entering the public imaginary, becoming secularized in art and film and commodified in advertising. Drawing on Catherine Clément’s seminal work, Syncope: The Philosophy of Rapture (1994), this thesis will offer a theoretical approach to understanding the syncopeic image that is based on Clément’s Four Circles of syncope and her radical association of syncope with female absence from the social scape. This dissertation will also introduce for the first time the concept of spectatorship in relation to syncope which I will argue constitutes a fifth circle. This thesis holds that syncope as an artistic mode of expression has persisted over centuries, beginning with religious art and continuing in a secular form in film and advertising, because it fulfils specific social and cultural beliefs about femininity, the body, ecstasy and spirituality. This thesis will explore the syncopeic image as a feminized construct as it appears in art, film and advertising. However, in relationship to the syncopeic image, it is possible the feminine refers also to a world of imagination beyond the gendered body, beyond a politic of ‘woman’ and ‘man’ and into the seemingly undefinable space that attends syncope. A principle of the feminine hovers within and around the subject in syncope, whether it is a male or female body, the image is a feminized one. From the rational mind to ‘disintegration’, the journey of syncope can be over in an instant or captured forever in an image. This work is about the image, specifically a created image for consumption, from Jesus on the cross to a Gucci ad. This thesis will consider the radical potential of syncope for the way in which we understand the representation of woman and the feminine in the visual arts.
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ItemAustralia and the Pacific: the ambivalent place of Pacific peoples within contemporary Australia( 2018)My thesis examines the places (real and symbolic) accorded to Pacific peoples within the historical production of an Australian nation and in the imaginary of Australian nationalism. It demonstrates how these places reflect and inform the ways in which Australia engages with the Pacific region, and the extent to which Australia considers itself a part of or apart from the Pacific. While acknowledging the important historical and contemporary differences between the New Zealand and Australian contexts, I deploy theoretical concepts and methods developed within the established field of New Zealand- centred Pacific Studies to identify and analyse what is occurring in the much less studied Australian-Pacific context. In contrast to official Australian discourse, the experiences of Pacific people in Australia are differentiated from those of other migrant communities because of: first, Australia’s colonial and neo-colonial histories of control over Pacific land and people; and second, Pacific peoples' important and unique kinships with Aboriginal Australians. Crucially the thesis emphasises the significant diversity (both cultural and national) of the Pacific experience in Australia. My argument is advanced first by a historicisation of Australia’s formal engagements with Pacific people, detailing intersecting narratives of their migration to Australia and Australia’s colonial and neo- colonial engagements within the Pacific region. This is followed by case studies of two celebrated sites of Australian “Pacificness”: first, a mapping of the involvement of Pacific players in the sport of rugby league in Australia; and second, an analytic record of Australia’s representation at the 11th Festival of Pacific Arts, held in the Solomon Islands in 2012. A Pacific Studies methodology is developed to provide a theoretically sound and empirically informed approach to Pacific research that distinguishes it from current studies in or of the Pacific.