School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Research Publications

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Editorial introduction: A creative life

Colman, F. ; Stivale, C. J. ( 2006)

In seeking authors who might address the relationship between the notions of philosophy and of creativity, the call for papers for this special issue of Angelaki invited consideration of the physical terms of each of these pursuits – philosophy and creative invention. The daily praxes of individual authorial and artistic pursuits are what have drawn us close to these selected texts. Individual authors’ obsessions and obsessive interests highlight the immense variation in how aesthetics operates as a determinant mode for those individuals and the communities with which they choose to engage.
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".
Muscles, hybrids and new bad futures

NDALIANIS, ANGELA ( 1994)

Since Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone made their respective debuts onto the cinematic screen the muscle phenomenon has become a dominant factor in the cinema of the 1980s and 1990s. Muscle, in all its hard and sweaty glory, has found a market especially in the big budget extravaganzas whose narratives centre around the spectacle of the built bodies of male stars such as Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Lundgren, Van Damme, Snipes and Seagal, and the more padded forms of actors such as Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson. This new brand of cinema whilst harking back in part to an American tradition of genre cinema (the Western, Detective films, War Films etc.) appears to owe more to genres that emerged outside America: the Italian `gladiator' pictures of the 1950s and 1960s which retold the adventures of Hercules and other mythic heroes via the forms of bodybuilding stars such as Steve Reeves and Reg Park; and the martial arts action films popularized by Hong Kong Cinema and which found a very profitable market in the West ‐ and which also saw the migration of the genre into American cinema starring a series of martial arts experts including Chuck Norris, Bruce Lee and Jean‐Claude van Damme. Both genres revealed an unabashed display of the spectacle of action and the spectacle of the male body in action. The camera found any excuse to unapolegetically caress the bodies of the stars with pans, tracks and close‐ups of various fragmented body parts in ways that always denoted strength, agility and power.
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.
Muscle, excess and rupture: female bodybuilding and gender construction

NDALIANIS, ANGELA ( 1995-02)

In recent years bodybuilding culture has provided the backdrop to a series of debates centering around issues surrounding representations of gender and in particular the potential inherent in bodybuilding bodies to rupture preconceived notions regarding 'norms' of masculinity and femininity; for the meticulously controlled, predetermined construction and definition of mass and muscle on the bodybuilding figure has shifted the body from an arena dominated by assumptions centering around the natural to a sphere which exposes the body itself - and with it the power structures that impose meaning onto it - as informed by culture. The bodybuilding physique reveals the body as a socially determined construct, or to cite Kuhn, with the willed construction of bodies in bodybuilding, 'nature becomes culture'. (Kuhn 1988, 5) The question of marketability has, over the years, emerged as a key concern in bodybuilding. Of all sports, due to its tendency towards things excessive, bodybuilding tends to stand outside the mainstream appealing primarily to a select, cult following. There have been some exceptions of bodybuilders who successfully escaped the margins and entered mainstream culture, the most successful being Arnold Schwarzenegger (seven time Mr. Olympia) who opened the doors to big-time muscle in action cinema. More recently, female muscle has also started to make itself felt in the popular sphere, with Cory Everson (six time winner of the Ms. Olympia) appearing in films such as Double Impact alongside Jean Claude van Damme, and professional bodybuilders Raye Hollitt, Shelley Beattie and Tonya Knight starring in the successful U.S. television show American Gladiators. Despite breaking through to mainstream culture, however, these bodybuilders have served as examples of 'freaks' in a world of 'norms'; they signal a moment of excess allowed to seep through into the dominant, but these moments are always about controlled forms of excess - they, in a sense, constitute an orderly disruption.
'Hail to the King!' – the return of doom

NDALIANIS, ANGELA ( 2004-12)

It was back in 1993 that the horror was unleashed in the form of the DOOM: EVIL UNLEASHED. Developed by the Texas-based company id Software, this computer game was to introduce radical innovations not only to the First Person Shooter (FPS) genre, but also to the soft and hardware technology that drove gaming. In 1994, the sequel DOOM II: HELL ON EARTH was to push the envelope further still. Drawing upon the science fiction and horror conventions of cinematic examples like ALIEN (Ridley Scott, 1979), ALIENS (James Cameron, 1986) and EVIL DEAD II (Sam Raimi, 1987), both DOOM games upped the ante in game culture by transferring experiences familiar to the horror and science fiction film spectator over to the gamer. Discussing DOOM's influences, Jay Wilbur, the then chief executive officer of id stated that id ‘wanted to make an ALIEN-like game that captured the fast-paced action, brutality and fear of those movies’, while also amplifying the action and horror with EVIL DEAD II, whose ‘chainsaws and shotguns are an unbeatable combination’. It would not be an understatement to say that these two games are up there with the most popular and influential games in game history. Significantly, one of the concerns of the games’ creators – John Carmack and John Romero – was to transfer the dread, suspense and terror that was familiar to film audiences into the game environment. Fast forward to 2004: a new breed of game horror is born again in the form of the PC-game DOOM 3 (to be released in December 2004 on X"Box). Like its addictive predecessors, DOOM 3 introduces an even greater ‘filmic’ quality to its game space and, yet again, a new standard of gaming aesthetics and technology is created. Todd Hollenshead, head of id Software has stated that ‘DOOM 3 is a video game experience unlike any before it… From the cinema quality visuals and the incredible 5.1 sound, to the terrifying atmosphere and hyper-realistic environments, the whole game screams “interactive horror film”.’ In particular, the DOOM games typify a strong tendency amongst game developers towards fetishizing the film object, and what is perceived as the cinema’s convincing illusion of ‘realism’. But the cinema is by no means the only media form that has impacted upon games. Through an analysis of DOOM 3 and its heritage, this essay will address the question of games and their history, arguing that their reliance on past sources does not detract from their uniqueness. The creators of games like DOOM 3 deliberately place their creations within a rich, diverse tapestry of media history not in an admission of their lack of originality, but rather so that they can flag their innovation. In fact, as will be argued below, the ways in which John Carmack (Lead Programmer of the DOOM trilogy) and the rest of the production team at id Software arrange and reshape their influences has a story to tell us about how these games situate themselves within the arena of competing entertainment media.
"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.
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.
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.
Robert Smithson’s ghost in 1920s Hamburg: reading Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas as a non-site

Brown, L. ; Green, C. ( 2002)

While we can discern an archival turn in contemporary art—of works such as Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig (1999) and of exhibitions such as “Deep Storage” (1998)—the aim of this paper is not merely to identify iconologist Aby Warburg as prefiguring that turn, but to read Warburg’s last work in relation to Earth artist Robert Smithson’s non-sites as a means of opening up discussion on the function of art as archive, and archive as art. The work with which we primarily concern ourselves is Warburg’s final unfinished work, Mnemosyne Atlas (1927-29)—started the same year as the more famous, equally incomplete collection of quoted texts by Walter Benjamin, his Arcades Project (1927-1940). Warburg has always been regarded as a canonical but maverick figure: he was a founder of iconology (the study of the historical development of iconographic symbols) and the key figure in the revival of the study of Antique art (late in his life, through the agency of the Warburg Institute, located first in Hamburg and later in London). Robert Smithson was arguably the key conceptualist artist in the transition between modernist and postmodernist art; he was also a prolific and influential writer on contemporary art. Both arrived at theorisations of art as archive and of memory storage by art just at the point that the life of each was tragically cut short.