School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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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.
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ItemCircuits, computers, cassettes, correspondence: the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre 1976 - 1984( 2016)This thesis examines the production and presentation of experimental music, art, performance and installation by a group of musicians, visual artists, writers, performers and film makers who were involved in the activities taking place at the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, Melbourne from 1976 until 1984. This thesis will investigate the musical influence of the generation of practitioners who founded the Clifton Hill and taught at the La Trobe University Music Department. It will examine their influence upon the younger generation, with focus on the close relationships both generations had with the broader music and visual art scenes of Melbourne and Australia. This thesis traces a transitional moment in artistic production between the older and younger generations, which was an illustration of the broader shift in Australian artistic culture from modernism to postmodernism. I will document the artistic work of a younger generation at the Music Centre as a symptom of a new postmodern mode of engagement in order to determine what place the Clifton Hill occupies within a history of emergent postmodern theories in Australian art.
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ItemSwirls of shouts and rivers of shapes: futurism's crowd( 2016)This thesis sheds new light on the representation of crowds in paintings, drawings and illustrations by Italian futurist artists produced between 1900 and 1915. By focusing on the aesthetic and emotional responses of the Italian avant-gardist group to the urban multitudes, it proposes a new interpretation of how the Futurists conceived of the relationship between artist and crowd. Contrary to a tendency in recent scholarly literature to read Futurism's depictions of the crowd as constructing a political collective to be moulded in a manner akin to a proto-fascist vision of society, this thesis shows how in its early years the Italian artistic avant-garde elaborated a view of the crowd which resists such politically instrumental interpretations. Between 1910 and 1912 the Futurists artists, drawing upon attitudes to the crowd they had developed prior to joining the avant-garde movement, interpreted the spontaneous gatherings of the urban multitude as a startling visual phenomenon and as an expanded collective subject endowed with emotion. In such works, the futurist artists demonstrated their intention to implicate the viewer not in a collective action directed towards specific political goals, but rather in an intensely emotional, aesthetic experience. In 1914 and 1915, the Futurists turned their attention to mass gatherings associated with patriotic and interventionist campaigns in which the artists themselves were directly involved. In spite of their more explicitly political subject matter, in the artworks made during this period the Futurists were primarily concerned with depicting the crowd as a dynamic, heterogeneous context with which the artist was to merge and into which he disappeared. In both periods, this thesis argues, the Futurists did not envision the crowd in their visual works as a mouldable mass to be dominated and controlled by a political or artistic leader, but rather as an uncontrollable, immersive event in which the artist and viewer participated to the point of self-annulment and dispersion. Despite the rallying cries in the founding manifesto of 1909 and the various political views of the artists themselves in the period under analysis, futurist artistic depictions of the crowd between 1910 and 1915 were alternative to a proto-fascist imagery of political exhortation.
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ItemAnatomy of a workshop: the Procaccini family in Milan( 2016)Contextualized in Milan between the end of the 16th and the start of the 17th century, this study investigates the artistic trajectory of the three Procaccini brothers: Camillo (1561-1629), Carlo Antonio (1571-1631) and Giulio Cesare (1574-1625), one of the most important families of painters of the early Italian Seicento. Descending from an Emilian background, the Procaccini influenced the evolution of Lombard art, establishing a famous workshop in Milan and playing a fundamental role in the artistic renovation of the Borromean era, one of the most fascinating periods in Milanese art history. Procaccini’s work is here analysed under the reciprocal perspective of the family workshop, inter-connecting their individual careers and understanding their success as the combination of mutual artistic choices, high level of specialization and precise business organization. In doing so this study revises and updates the modern scholarly literature, which has generally focused on the Procaccini’s individual careers, underestimating both their connections as family members and the importance of their workshop as the key locus of artistic growth and stylistic innovation. Predicated on a micro-sociological approach aimed at understanding the social and eco-nomic conditions under which Procaccini’s art was created, the study is organized according to a chronological framework that retraces the conceptualization, establishment and evolution of their family workshop. Starting from Camillo, Carlo Antonio and Giulio Cesare’s biographies as drawn in 1678 by the Bolognese art historian Carlo Cesare Malvasia, it unravels the Procaccini’s business strategy, highlighting their mutual effort in becoming the most important family of painters working in Milan at the beginning of the 17th century. Dealing with macro-areas of analysis such as family workshops, artists’ training, aristocratic patronage and art market, the study looks at archival evidence of the Procaccini’s social and professional lives, proposing attributions based on documentary, stylistic and technical evidence. The result is a comprehensive analysis that, for the very first time, emphasizes the Procaccini’s role as a family of painters, providing an innovative approach for the study of their celebrated artistic careers.
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ItemDisplays of union: Scottish art and British cultural identity in Australia, 1860-1945( 2015)Scottish art was consistently collected and displayed in Australia from the mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century and continues to be included in the nation’s historic art museums to the present day. Public art institutions, such as the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, were established in the second half of the nineteenth century to serve as destinations of recreation and moral instruction in the British colonies. Consequently, works of Scottish art – together with displays of Scottish visual culture in the public and private spheres of society, more broadly – have contributed to the development of Australia’s cultural mores as they exist today. Yet the demarcation of Scottish art from ‘British’ art has only recently been undertaken in Australia, and remains to be fully explored. This thesis aims to offer an account of how and why Scottish art has been displayed in Australia. With a focus on the public collections of Victoria, this thesis will examine several important examples of Scottish art acquired up until the close of World War Two. The value of this undertaking is twofold: firstly, it ensures that the contributions of Scottish art and visual culture in this context are not sidelined in favour of English contributions and, secondly, it illustrates the interdependence of Scottish art and Britishness within the context of the Empire. This project thereby assists in the delineation of Scottish influences and characteristics from within the larger narrative of British cultural identity in Australia. The examples presented in this thesis encompass paintings, interior decoration and public statuary. By drawing on recent scholarship in the fields of art history, Scottish studies, empire studies and cultural geography, this project aims to reappraise these works of art and visual culture and, in turn, reveal the historic significance of Scottish art in Australia. By positioning this investigation as a new voice in contemporary dialogues concerning the role of the Scottish nation within the British state, this thesis will argue that Scottish art was a vital component in the establishment of British cultural identity in Australia across the period of at least a century. It will also be shown that Scottish art continues to have a prominent place in the cultural collections of this settler nation.
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ItemBones of contention: the changing conventions of anatomical illustration 1690-1750( 2015)This thesis examines the changes in anatomical illustration between 1690 and 1750 through the close investigation of two case studies. During this period there was a change from the conventions established by Vesalius that had dominated the field, to a search for a more modern interpretation that incorporated new technologies and anatomical discoveries. Against a background of wunderkammer display and the association of the body with vanitas sentiment as demonstrated in the work of Dr Frederik Ruysch, a new form of illustration was sought that drew upon contemporary artistic and philosophical ideas. Previously, anatomical illustration has been examined as an adjunct to the history of medicine however the artistic influences upon the images have been largely overlooked. I argue that during this period there were a number of contributing influences from both the fields of science and art that combined to affect the evolving form of anatomical illustration.