School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications

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    Carpaccio, Saint Stephen, and the topography of Jerusalem
    Marshall, David R. ( 1984)
    Those buildings and topographical motifs in Jerusalem represented by Carpaccio in his Saint Stephen cycle are discussed, as are the ways in which they were represented by artists before Carpaccio. It can be deduced that Carpaccio's sole source for his renderings was in the woodcuts by Reuwich in the 1486 book by Breydenbach on the Holy Land. Suggestions of other sources and of a visit by Carpaccio may be discarded. Conclusions can be drawn about Carpaccio's approach to the representation of real landscape.
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    Piranesi, Juvarra, and the triumphal bridge tradition
    Marshall, David R. ( 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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    Doppelgangers and the third force: the artistic collaborations of Gilbert & George and Marina Abramovic/Ulay
    Green, C. ( 2000)
    Gilbert & George’s and Marina Abramovic/Ulay’s actions of the 1970s were collaborations that blurred and doubled the “normal” figure of the artist as an individual body. This type of collaboration had the properties of a third identity, but did the new identity resemble a third hand, a doppelganger (an apparition associated with death, sometimes experienced historically as a shadow or as the double of a living person), or a phantom extension of the artists’ joint will, rather like a phantom limb? The nature of this modified artist is important, for it represents a strategy to convince the audience of new understandings of artistic identity. In this regard, these 1970s actions now seem absolutely prescient with respect to art in the late 1990s, in which so many artists absented themselves from the position of either author or maker. The believability of Gilbert & George’s action, The Singing Sculpture (1969-73), was linked to their manipulation of absorption and theatricality, the qualities Michael Fried theorized in his influential study of Denis Diderot’s bourgeois milieu in eighteenth-century Paris. Gilbert & George were emphasizing a physical and mental discontinuity between artists and their beholders. The idea of art that encodes personal absence and misplaced identity, of going away and leaving markers or traces of that departure, is far from new and has at least one clear artistic precedent from a much earlier period - the Enlightenment. It had been theorized, for example, in a completely different context, that of Denis Diderot’s 1767 essays on the landscape painter Claude-Joseph Vernet. In his celebrated “Salon” of 1767, Diderot imagined himself stepping into and taking country walks in Verner’s landscapes. To recapitulate Fried’s elaborations of Diderot’s theories, this imagining was prompted by Diderot’s proposal that the spectator of a painting must be free and active, not just a passive consumer, and conversely that the painting itself should seem to be an impassive object in nature and not appear to be asking to be looked at. Diderot was arguing for two ideas: The beholder has an active place and role in the work of art, and the work of art can be a place in which the artist or the viewer could “go for a walk” and mentally move around within the picture-space. The resulting artistic preference for the painter’s self-effacement and depersonalization represented a departure from previous Rococo ideas of theatrical self-presentation and the spectator’s appreciation of such theatricality. Mental travel was part of the process of dissociation in a special case of absorption - the pastoral - in which the disembodied spectator became a visually active phantom participant in the work itself.
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    "Causa di stravaganze": order and anarchy in Domenico Gargiulo's Revolt of Masaniello
    Marshall, Christopher R. ( 1998)
    Three paintings by Domenico Gargiulo of the revolt of Masaniello in 1647 have been interpreted as an anti-Spanish commentary. Close analysis of the events depicted in Gargiulo's major painting of the revolt and of the political sympathies of his patrons, however, reveals the contrary to be the case. In this and other paintings, Gargiulo reinforces conventional stereotypes of the Neapolitan lower classes as fundamentally capricious and irrational. These negative visions of popular anarchy are to be contrasted with the propriety, unity, and stability displayed by the establishment in Gargiulo's other pictures of contemporary events.
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    The ice-age
    GREEN, CHARLES (Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2007)
    Lee Bul’s Mon grand récit: because everything … 2005 is a table-top miniature world. One of a pair of major sculptures sharing the same title and mapping the same mysterious topography, the Govett-Brewster’s Mon grand récit: because everything’s alter ego, Mon grand récit: weep into stones… 2005 was shown at the Basel Art Fair in 2005. The two works are very similar, though the Govett-Brewster version is slightly larger and is dominated by a glossy, sprawling, white base resembling a vast glacier, whereas the same forms in Weep into stones… are suspended in space, like a huge train-set on scaffolding. Both works are composed of images of the wreckage of modern history’s mass utopias, of the twentieth century visions of crazy perfection that were shared by capitalism, fascism and communism. These visions have now disintegrated. First, this essay looks at Mon grand récit: because everything… as a work of art that represents the duration of modern history and its entropic end. It does this by translating duration into metonymic images, into images that represent the twentieth century’s failed utopias by architectural models of never-completed modernist monuments in construction: a hanging, bent wood freeway hovering above a snowy abyss; a mountainous central tower encrusted with miniature crystal models; a tiny scale model of Vladimir Tatlin’s never-constructed Monument to the Third International 1920 perched on a glacial waste. Second, the essay shows that because Lee Bul presents modern history as both personal and shared, the instructional diorama represents her quite strategic and very conscious argument against contemporary art criticism’s hermeneutics of nationality, in favour of a determinedly global perspective.
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    Susan Norrie
    CREED, BARBARA ( 2004)
    The work of Susan Norrie, which now spans more than two decades, is challenging, provocative and inspirational. As with all visionary artists, Norrie’s practice has developed and changed over time, now incorporating painting, objects, still and moving images and sound. from her paintings to her installations and video projections, Norrie’s work combines technical brilliance and extraordinary talent with an acute and restless intelligence.
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    Imperial legacy: the politics of display in Australia
    MARSHALL, CHRISTOPHER ( 2004)
    Somewhere among the countless rows of objects currently on display in the British Museum’s Enlightenment exhibition there rests a flaking bark shield. This battered, utilitarian object stands somewhat apart from the splendidly exotic artefacts that surround it. Yet beneath its unprepossessing appearance there lies an extraordinary provenance. It was taken in 1770 from the Eastern Australian seaboard by Captain Cook’s landing party during its initial encounter with the first inhabitants of the land incorporating what is now known as Sydney. The shield has been placed in a display of non-Western artefacts acquired during the period of Enlightenment discovery “through gift, trade or purchase”. In truth, however, none of these words could be used to describe its acquisition. It was hardly given, since it came into the party’s possession as a result of their shooting at a group of Eora people who left the cover of trees, apparently shouting at them to leave. Neither was it traded, unless one views a bullet fired in anger as a fair offer of exchange. Nor could it be called a purchase, unless one counts as a purchase price the blood shed by its original owner as he was hit trying to flee the invaders.
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    Abstract art, ethics and interpretation: the case of Mario Radice
    WHITE, ANTHONY ( 2004)
    Modernist abstract art can be interpreted as the expression of ethical ideals. The elimination of figuration and illusionistic space in the work of abstract painters such as Piet Mondrian or Frank Stella might seem to militate against any reading of their work as embodying principles or standards of human conduct. However, I will demonstrate in this essay that a specific example of modernist abstraction, created in Italy during the 1930s, can be interpreted as responding to ethical principles articulated in the culture at large. I will also show that such principles are not inherent in the formal structure of such works, as the ethical meaning attributed to them depends upon the context in which they are received.
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    On display: Dr Christopher Marshall
    MARSHALL, CHRISTOPHER ( 2006)
    An interview with Dr. Christopher R. Marshall, senior lecturer in Art History and Museum Studies at the University of Melbourne.