School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemRational fictions: Hollis Frampton's Magellan and the atlas of film( 2019)This thesis analyses three films by Hollis Frampton (1936-1984): Magellan (1964–1984), Palindrome, (1969), and Zorns Lemma (1970). I argue that Frampton sought to organise knowledge on film by recuperating the atlas—a highly selective tableau of images arranged spatially—as a model to promote film as a form of cultural memory in contrast to history. It begins with an examination of these themes in Frampton’s writing, following his conceptualisation of what he called ‘the infinite film’ and ‘the infinite cinema’ in his 1971 essay “For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses” and the subsequent essay “Digressions on the Photographic Agony,” from 1972. After an analysis of how his unfinished, 36-hour-long film-cycle titled Magellan developed from this model, I argue that Zorns Lemma (1970) can be re-framed as an experiment in “filmnemonics”. This latter film left Frampton unsatisfied, however, due to the way in which it emphasised photography’s subordination to traditional systems of inscription, both alphabetical and numerical, in the highly determined matrix of the film frame. Finally, I argue that Frampton recognised that his earlier film, Palindrome (1969), was the experiment most appropriate for realising the model of the atlas of film. Frampton’s decision to include Palindrome within the Magellan cycle is proof not only of the importance of that film and its significance for understanding the complexity of the long, calendrical film cycle as a whole, but also of his shift to a topological model of film. Central to the thesis is the idea of conflation as a means to link memory with formal attempts at thinking in images, as demonstrated by Frampton’s work, addressing how he strove to accommodate film in its complexity while also providing a path through its infinity.
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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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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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ItemThis thing is intricate and it's everywhere: the art of Michael Stevenson as a model of historical time( 2018)This thesis is the first detailed, scholarly analysis of the practice of the Berlin-based New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson (b. 1964). It examines the substantial body of work extending from Stevenson’s paintings of the late 1980s to the research-based installation projects he produced in 2012. The research has been motivated by two questions: What is it that ties this artist’s practice together? And what is its particular contemporary relevance? An eschatological model of historical time built from the unlikely combination of fundamentalist Christianity and postmodern theory underpins all of Stevenson’s work. This model constitutes an important contribution to current thinking about time and history. Stevenson’s works are at odds with both the linear time of modernity, and also the pluralist and horizonless “presentism” of contemporaneity. This thesis stems from a recognition of the central importance of Stevenson’s early religious experiences to his later art practice. The significance of his religious paintings of the late 1980s has never previously been acknowledged. The cataclysmic collision of postmodernity and Pentecostalism in Stevenson’s life and thinking during the 1980s, however, was formative. Following his departure from religious faith, Stevenson’s art practice has been a multi-decade project to reconstruct a shattered world-view, and also a deep engagement with the historical conditions of our time. Repeatedly circling the intellectual problems he encountered in and around the late 1980s—problems thrown into relief by the coincidence of postmodernism, the end of the Cold War, and his departure from the Church—Stevenson has developed a model of historical time that draws from both postmodern scepticism and religious faith.
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ItemFrom diplomacy to diffusion: the Macartney mission and its impact on the understanding of Chinese art, aesthetics, and culture in Great Britain, 1793-1859( 2018)Recent art historical scholarship has begun to expand with studies in cross-cultural convergences and transferences garnering newfound attention. This dissertation, through a series of close readings, examines how the deterioration in the relationship between China and Britain manifests in art. In particular, I am concerned with the corollary concepts of depiction and diffusion: that is, how do British artists depict China and the Chinese, and then, how do these depictions diffuse into British visual and material culture more broadly? The primary temporal focus begins with the Macartney diplomatic embassy of 1793, and ends with Victoria’s accession. Through a semiotic interpretation, I demonstrate that the subtle changes in the British visual depiction of recurring Chinese signs (such as the pagoda or ladies of rank) reveal concomitant shifts in attitudes towards China. The concepts of depiction and diffusion comprise the first and second halves, respectively. Chapter Two examines the visual templates that the Jesuit missionaries based at the Beijing court created. Chapters Three and Four center on the imagery of William Alexander, who served as junior artist to the Macartney mission. His two illustrated travelogues (published 1805 and 1814) synthesized signifiers of China that had circulated in Britain for over a century, but his reinterpretation, in addition to his anthropological approach, anticipate an imperialistic turn. His images—which, notably, departed from the the fantastical chinoiserie which predated them— purported to demonstrate to armchair-travelers the way China ‘looked,’ but it is this very claim to authenticity which requires that the images be read anew through a postcolonial lens. Alexander’s images inform the work of Thomas Allom, who created entirely new Chinese scenes in the wake of the Opium Wars; this is taken up in Chapter Five. Chapters Six and Seven seeks to understand the diffusion of Chinese imagery in Britain, and what the cultural signification of that diffusion is. Chapter Six discusses the role of the anglo- chinois garden in eighteenth-century Britain. It also examines the role that William Chambers played in popularizing Chinese motifs, and how his legacy and contribution to an emerging Romantic aesthetic has been obscured in previous literature. Chapter Seven details the interior design scheme of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton (decorated 1802-1823). In the Music Room, Alexander’s documentary imagery has been transformed into decorative spectacle, and pagodas were miniaturized, trivialized, and brought inside: in this regard, Britain sought to possess China by proxy. By interpreting Britain’s Chinese imagery through a semiotic framework, I examine how artists and audiences negotiated increasing contact with China. Evocations of familiar signs belie a deteriorating relationship, which was hastened by Britain’s rapid industrialization and the unabating desire for Chinese goods. As art history embarks on an intercultural turn, connections between China and Britain in the early modern, proto-global world must be included in this field. This dissertation serves as one such point of departure.
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ItemExquisite joy, exquisite privilege: the unrealised Great War memorial designs of Australian architect William Lucas( 2017)This thesis is the first sustained scholarly examination of the unrealised Great War memorial designs of the Australian architect William Lucas. Its thorough examination of previously unstudied research material enables a detailed evaluation of Lucas’ intellectual and aesthetic outlook, and the way in which this manifested in his war memorial designs for Melbourne and Villers-Bretonneux. During his time practising in South Africa, Lucas was exposed to an Imperially nuanced revival of classical form, a lesson which consolidated his own first-hand experience of classical architecture, which he had gained in a journey to the Mediterranean in 1908. His own experience as a non-combatant YMCA volunteer during the Boer War, meanwhile, fostered and amplified his belief that war had spiritual value. It enabled an essentially distant view of war as a scene played out within a spectacular landscape. This vision was echoed in scenic terms by the accounts his son Norman sent home from the Dardanelles and Macedonia during the Great War. Dying of wounds in 1916, Norman fulfilled Lucas’ own firm conception of Christian manhood, proving his belief that a just war had spiritual value by facilitating opportunities for self-sacrifice. For his own Great War memorial designs, Lucas continued to look to classicism, but applied it within the parameters of his own spiritual and aesthetic outlook. His design for a war memorial for Melbourne took the form of a semicircular ancient theatre, inspired by the structures he had seen in the Mediterranean in 1908. Lucas intended the theatre form as a symbol of democracy: an open-air gathering place for sacred military, civic and spiritual ritual. His design for the Australian Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, France, employed classical form to create the aesthetic of an ancient ruin. To convey this aesthetic, Lucas looked to the principles of the sublime as expounded by John Ruskin, and harnessed the symbolic potential of the ever-changeable sky. Both designs drew on Lucas’ own spiritual convictions. Lucas’ memorial designs were expressions of his own interwoven beliefs in the superiority and righteousness of the British Empire, his faith in his God, the romantic possibilities of landscape and form, and his own conviction of the righteousness of a just war. But what was missing from his mindset was the insight necessary to address the problematic and poignant absence of the dead. His own grief at the loss of his son was touched with his own unshakeable religious convictions, and a belief in the righteousness of the British Empire. As such, his memorial designs were essays in an architectural and ideological vocabulary which would become defunct in the decades following the Great War.
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ItemModernity and contemporaneity in "Cambodian Arts" after independence( 2017)This study of “Cambodian arts” since national independence understands modernity and contemporaneity as conceptually coextensive categories. Through detailed analyses of different artworks and their contexts—comprising painting, architecture, performance, cinema, and literature—this thesis proposes that modern and contemporary “Cambodian arts” are defined by coeval new and old forms, intersections between media, and an intertwining of art and ideology. It focuses primarily on the years 1955-1975, while also making trans-historical comparisons by interspersing more recent art practices into its discussion.
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Item[Re]framing the f word: The case for the collection and exhibition of art forgery in Australia( 2016)The perception of art forgery as incompatible with legitimate art historical enquiry has been revised in recent years, as scholars have begun to re-evaluate the significance of the inauthentic art object and its creator. Previous art historical consideration of the subject has been largely reactive, a response to attribution questions, rather than viewing the subject as one worthy of study in its own right. While an uneasy relationship exists between forgery and the broader art world, the dominance of popular culture and media myths of the ‘hero forger’ point to the necessity of further art historical attention to assist in defining the topic and clarifying the issues for the general public. This dissertation is divided into three sections: the first examines the development of literature on the subject of art forgery, noting where and why it has been considered by other disciplines. It explores the traditional approach to the topic, in which art historians have tended to document art forgery as “a series of isolated cases”, rather than as a holistic area of study. The second part examines the development of a mythology of the art forger, which has emerged from the growing number of forgers’ biographies and memoirs that became popular in the latter half of the twentieth century. This mythology is also evident in popular culture representations and informs the ways in which the media report on the issues surrounding forgery, and underpins the references to art forgery that occasionally appear in marketing and public relation campaigns. The final part of the thesis examines the way in which international cultural institutions have used art historical tools such as cataloguing, collection and exhibition, as an educative tool; a recent touring exhibition titled Intent to Deceive is used as a case study to assess the effectiveness of its pedagogical aim. By tracing art forgery’s emergence as a subject of academic scholarship, this dissertation argues that the proactive study, collecting, cataloguing and exhibition of inauthentic objects is an important strategy to counter the often-contradictory and fictionalised narratives surrounding art forgery. Ultimately, it is argued that Australia has trailed behind the international trend of considering art forgery as an important subject worthy of closer examination and art historical enquiry.
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ItemLooking back: contemporary feminist art in Australia and New Zealand( 2016)This thesis sets out to examine the ways in which feminism manifests itself in contemporary art, focusing in particular on Australia and New Zealand. Interviews were conducted with practicing contemporary artists Kelly Doley, FANTASING (Bek Coogan, Claire Harris, Sarah-Jane Parton, Gemma Syme), Deborah Kelly, Jill Orr and Hannah Raisin. During these interviews, a number of key themes emerged which form the integral structure of the thesis. A combination of information drawn from interviews, close reading of art works, and key theoretical texts is used to position contemporary feminist art in relation to its recent history. I will argue that the continuation of feminist practices and devices in contemporary practice points to a circular pattern of repetition in feminist art, which resists a linear teleology of art historical progress. The relationship between feminism and contemporary art lies in the way that current practices revisit crucial issues which continue to cycle through the lived experience of femininity, such as the relationship to the body, to labour and capital, to the environment, and to structures of power. By acknowledging that these issues are not tied to a specific historical period, I argue that feminist art does not constitute a short moment of prolific production in the last few decades of the twentieth century, but is a sustained movement which continually adapts and shifts in order to remain abreast of contemporary issues.
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ItemCentre Five sculptors: the formation of an alternative professional avant-garde( 2016)This thesis examines the previously unknown origins of Centre Five, a group of mainly émigré sculptors influential in Melbourne in the 1950s and 1960s, who are widely regarded as having played a key role in the advancement of modernist sculpture in Australia. In part a group biography of the seven sculptors, the thesis examines their little-known backgrounds in order to establish the roots of the group’s collective philosophy, particularly with regards to the integration of sculpture and architecture. Five of the sculptors – Vincas Jomantas (1922-2001), Julius Kane (1921-62), Inge King (1915-2016), Clifford Last (1918-91) and Teisutis Zikaras (1922-91) – were European born, trained and nurtured amidst various cosmopolitan modernities that emerged in Britain, Germany, Hungary and Lithuania between and during the two world wars. The two Australian-born members – Lenton Parr (1924-2003) and Norma Redpath (1928-2013) – derived their outlook from European models and would later live and work in Britain and Italy respectively. As such, this thesis is less a study of Australian sculpture than it is a study of European sculpture directly before, during and after World War Two. In 1953 Kane, King, Last and Redpath began exhibiting together in Melbourne as the Group of Four; later, in 1961, they joined with the other three sculptors to form Centre Five. However, I focus on the years 1935 to 1952, ending just before the group began to coalesce – at which point they effectively enter Australian art history. The thesis departs from most other studies of wartime and post-war modernist art in placing less emphasis on traumatic rupture than on strategies of survival and the adaptation of earlier modernist agendas. Specifically I argue that the émigré sculptors practiced a form of ‘alternative professionalism’, meaning they deployed the strategies of professionalism for anti-academic and essentially avant-garde purposes. They had a concise program of goals, made concerted overtures to architects, and regularly proselytized to the public and the press on the subject of abstract modern sculpture – particularly as it related to the urban and built environment – and, as such, constituted an identifiably cohesive local avant-garde. Tracing inter-tangled transnational histories of exchange between diverse modernities – peripheral and central – the thesis complicates existing Australian, British, German and Lithuanian nationalist art histories and contributes to an ongoing alternative modernities project. It also demonstrates the inadequacies of the old model of Australian art lagging provincially behind that of Europe and North America. Influences do not simply diffuse radially from centre to periphery, but rather occur simultaneously in multiple locales, in different guises. Similarly, the so-called ‘call to order’ of the 1930s is shown to reoccur after WWII, particularly in French-occupied Germany, reflecting a recurrent cyclical pattern of modernist art – looking backwards and looking forwards – rather than the persistent teleological model of canon formation.