School of Culture and Communication - Theses

Permanent URI for this collection

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Rational fictions: Hollis Frampton's Magellan and the atlas of film
    Fielke, Giles Simon ( 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.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Contesting womanhood: the American New Woman in literary and popular culture, 1890-1930
    Story, Natasha Amy ( 2015)
    Who was the American New Woman and why was she important to female literary writers from the period 1890 to 1930? My thesis explores this question by focusing specifically on the relationship between literary writings and the popular culture portrayals of the New Woman appearing in American magazines, many of which were in the form of advertisements and visual illustrations. I critically examine selected works of five American female writers who engaged with this figure in notably different ways, exploring among other things the socio-historical contexts of their literary works in order to understand why the ideology of the New Woman was so appealing and so pervasive, why it spawned so many different responses from female writers and why it changed so dramatically over time. Beginning with major works by Kate Chopin and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, followed by Jessie Fauset and Edith Wharton and finishing with Nella Larsen, the thesis argues that in America the changing nature of the New Woman in popular culture helped lay the framework for female literary writers to imagine and create new forms of American womanhood. It further contends that although she was often stereotyped in popular culture, the New Woman’s identity proved to be more flexible in literary works and that this complexity extended to both “white” and “black” writers. An additional contention is that unlike white women writers, African-American women writers were obliged to suppress their sexuality since to do otherwise was to reinforce the stereotype of animality that had been projected upon them since the era of slavery.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Lost property: the marginalisation of the artefact in contemporary museum theatre
    CLYNE, JOANNA ( 2015)
    The use of performance as an interpretive tool in museums has a long, although largely under-researched, history. Central to this thesis is the paradoxical observation that performance in museums, or ‘museum theatre’, regularly fails to engage with collection items. The title of the thesis, ‘lost property’, refers to both the apparent displacement of collection objects as the subject of museum theatre and the complexities of performing historical artefacts in a museum without reducing their significance to the status of a theatrical prop. Traditionally, the object has been central to the concept of ‘museum’. With the advent of a new museological approach to the running of museums, the exhibition object seems to have taken a subordinate role to the presentation of ideas and concepts through exhibition design and interpretation. This thesis draws on disciplinary literature, case studies, site visits and interviews with museum theatre practitioners to identify and examine the factors that have contributed to the shifting focus of performance based on objects to performance based on ideas.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Australian Aboriginal art in the United States of America, 1941-1966
    RANDOLPH, KIRA ( 2014)
    The United States has been collecting and exhibiting Australian Aboriginal art since the Great American Exploring Expedition of 1838-1842. Collections from Port Jackson gathered during this expedition were displayed in the Washington DC Patent Office until 1851. Such early collecting and display is rarely noted or discussed in the literature on the history of Australian Aboriginal art and its exhibition. This dissertation seeks to redress this oversight through the story of Australian Aboriginal art in the United States as told by case studies. The primary topic of this dissertation is exhibitions; however, other events that raised American awareness of this topic will also be evaluated. This is a piece of historical research informed by interdisciplinary scholarship on Aboriginal art. In writing about the representation of Aboriginal culture, I propose that it is not sufficient to identify what and where exhibitions occurred, the historic backdrop, politics, and people involved, also require consideration. Through a close reading of archival material, the chapter structure reflects four narrative themes emergent from analysis of exhibitions and events as case studies. These themes are: Aboriginal art as historic Australian art, as cultural, Stone Age, and fine art. The following research questions guide this study: what were the major representations of Australian Aboriginal art and culture in the United States? What informed the narratives of these events? Lastly, what parties were involved in the organisation of these cross-cultural displays and what impact did this have? This thesis argues that investigation into the geographic reception of Australian Aboriginal art in America provides evidence of its shifting conception and value. This has significant impact given recent statements that it was the American reception of Aboriginal Art that facilitated its acceptance as high art in Australia. Case studies include: Art of Australia, 1788-1941 (1941), a touring exhibition that began at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, funded by the Carnegie Corporation and guest curated by Theodore Sizer; and Arts of the South Seas (1946), organised by Rene d’Harnoncourt that showed at the Museum of Modern Art. Also considered are the promotional efforts of anthropologist Charles Pearcy Mountford and his cross-country “Australia’s Stone Age Men” lecture tour that eventuated in the American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land (1948). In 1966 three separate exhibitions showed in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Kansas. Edward Lehman Ruhe who was a major but largely unknown Aboriginal art aficionado is discussed for his pioneering efforts exhibiting Aboriginal art from his private collection from 1966-1977. The findings of this thesis suggest that Americans conceived and represented Aboriginal material as a form of art in the 1940s and 1950s, before Australia. Case study analysis also evidences that the exhibition of Aboriginal art was used for cultural diplomacy between Australian and the United States in the years surrounding World War II. Finally, certain individuals were particularly influential in realising exhibitions of Aboriginal art, and their legacies laid the foundation for displays today.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    ‘Something we can only desire’: writing the past in recent Australian literature & an extract from the novel 'To name those lost'
    Wilson, Rohan David ( 2014)
    In the last decade, the novel in Australia has come under increasing scrutiny from historians, academics, and the wider public as novelists offer a vision of our past that often sits uneasily beside more formal historiographic investigations. There is a general expectation that fiction should be truthful with the past. Fiction, however, often undermines the empiricist view of referentiality that history promotes, instead exploiting the paradoxical break from the referent that the imagined topography of fiction allows. This leads to what Ellison has called ‘referential anxiety’, or an uncomfortable awarness of the loss of reciprocity with the world. Given this range of responses and the paradox of which they are indicative, to claim that the novel is a form of historiography misunderstands the nature of truth in fiction. This dissertation focuses on three Australian novels that exemplify the problematics of reference, Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. The dissertation is paired with an extract from the novel To Name Those Lost, the story of an itinerant labourer and Black War veteran named Thomas Toosey. His journey takes him along the Launceston-Deloraine railway line during the early years of its operation as he searches for his son, William. Arriving in Launceston, Toosey finds the town in chaos. Riots break out in protest at a tax levied on citizens to pay for the rescue of shareholders in the bankrupt Launceston and Western Railway Company. Toosey is desperate to find his son who is somewhere in town amid the looting and general destruction, but at every turn he is confronted by the Irish transportee Fitheal Flynn and his companion, the hooded man, to whom Toosey owes a debt that he must repay.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    The art school and the university: research, knowledge, and creative practices
    Butt, Daniel James ( 2011)
    This thesis tracks changes in ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’ emerging from the incorporation of the art school into the university through the end of the 20th century. Identifying the need for historicised accounts of these contemporary institutions, the thesis synthesises the historical transformation of i) the modern university; ii) the art academy; and iii) the genre of the Ph.D. thesis that holds disciplinary knowledge in the arts and sciences through the 19th and 20th centuries. A key finding of this investigation is that these institutional forms have been revised according to different philosophical bases at different times, which is particularly evident in the substitution of science and natural philosophy for theology as the secular organising principle for the modern university. This displacement, which is also a repetition of its Christian heritage, begins in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, finally dominating higher research study by the 20th century. The investigation also finds that while studio art education has aspired to the status of liberal knowledge since at least the 15th century, its role as a university discipline remains conflicted, lacking a widely-held shared rationale for its modes of research that are nevertheless spreading rapidly through the provision of practice-based doctorates. The thesis argues that as with other new disciplines to the university, it will be through elaboration of a discipline-specific discourse drawn from the field itself that sustains its institutional acceptance, rather than the simple borrowing of other research definitions from other knowledge paradigms. Based on these findings, the final chapters of the thesis use scholarship in the history and philosophy of science to critique the Protestant-dominated moral economies embedded in scientific research paradigms that influence academic justifications for practice based research, with attention to postcolonial and feminist analyses of constitutive subjectivities underpinning these paradigms. The thesis then uses the work of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler on archives of knowledge to elaborate a process of performative individuation in relation to material ‘bodies of knowledge’, arguing that such a process differs from idealist scientific relationships to constative knowledge, and that this offers a more appropriate paradigm for considering the contributions to knowledge of the visual arts. Drawing upon Derrida’s account of the ‘university without condition’ (2002) and Spivak’s account of humanities learning, the thesis argues that the critical culture of ‘singularisation’ customary to the visual arts can productively address current transformations in the mission and operations of the university. A short postscript considers the implications of this argument for academic policies governing practice-led doctoral qualifications.
  • Item
    Thumbnail Image
    Present past, past present: history, memory and identity in six contemporary historiographic novels
    Huang, Yu-ting ( 2010)
    This thesis examines a selection of novels, published from 1990 onward, which engage with past-present relationships, considering the roles history and memory play in connecting us to the past. Examining a range of texts including Amin Maalouf’s Ports of Call (1999), A. S. Byatt’s Possession (1990), Margaret Scott’s Family Album (2000), Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1994), Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong (1994) and Bernhard Schlink’s The Reader (1997), I argue that each of my chosen novelists recognizes the socio-political manipulation behind historical narratives and that they affirm the importance of the past to characters in the present, who seek an understanding of their identities in relation to their heritage. Taking issue with Kerwin Lee Klein and Pierre Nora’s idea that history and memory are utterly antithetical and mutually exclusive, I argue that my selected novelists present both history and memory as subjective narratives. In the texts, the conflicts between historical accounts and memories reveal the inevitable discords between socio-political analyses and personal perception. Employing Hayden White’s argument of subjective history and key memory theories by Sigmund Freud, Dori Laub, Annette Kuhn, Louisa Passerini and E. Ann Kaplan to examine the contradictions between history and memory in each novel, I contend that the novelists regard the conflict as a form of positive disagreement. Each novel features characters who are stimulated to delve into the past to trace secrets and to solve mysteries, at the same time entering into a broader critique of the recording of ‘official’ histories. Importantly, while my chosen writers reveal doubts about the reliability of history, they do not attempt to supplant it with memory. Instead, they move towards a process of reconciliation, whereby history and memory complement and inform one another. In this thesis, I contend that by representing a sequence of quests to uncover the past, the novelists do not seek to assert historical certainty. What they foreground in the novels is the importance of building an emotional connection between the past and the present. Bringing readers to participate in their characters’ very private experiences—their struggles, their quests for the past and their reconfiguration of social and personal identities, these writers emphasize and celebrate the gap between history and memory. Each of my chosen novelists explores how history and memory teach us empathy with those who have come before, animating history and heritage so that far from being consigned to the past, they can inform the present.