VIBE 2019

Vibe. Southbank Arts Review

Contents / VIBE Magazine

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Contents.

Parallel Wiring Brazil and the Invention of the Solid Body Electric Guitar Adam May

The Existential Writer: Can an understanding of Irvin D Yalom’s four givens of existential psychotherapy influence the writing of a second draft of a screenplay? Ben Michael Streaming Data is the Ultimate Trust Exercise with the Moon Corinna Berndt Moving Through the Crystal Ball: The Circular Realities of Immanent Feminist Spirituality and Embodied Art Practice Kellie Wells Cancer as Model, Metaphor and Process: In the Generation of a Work for Theatre Derived from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Diane Stubbings The Fourth Persona: Archaeology of Costume. An Experimental Exhibition Emily Collett The Safety Spectre Mark Friedlander A Naïve Faith in Images: (Re)Construction of Two Files Emanuel Rodríguez-Chaves Working with Children: A Rights-Based Approach to Contemporary Performance Sarah Austin Indeterminate Self: Evoking the Indeterminacy Between ‘I See’ and Seeing Without the ‘I’ Through Video Medium Youjia Lu Narratives in Meditative Movement Rina Angela Corpus Sound, Motion and the Brain: How Sounds Affect the Creation of Movements Within an Improvised Performance Ioannis Sidiropoulos Towards Subversive Spectacle in Theory and Practice Jayde Kirchert Mud Map and Motorbike: Metaphors for Practice-Led Research Anna Loewendahl Tacktical Aesthetics: Some Partial Declarations Louisa Bufardeci

VIBE. Southbank Arts Review is supported by The University of Melbourne's Student Services and Amenities Fee (SSAF) Grant Program.

Chief Editor Jonathan Graffam Editorial Committee Emily Collett Donna Hensler Emanuel RodrĂ­guez-Chaves Hannah Spracklan-Holl Editorial Coordinators Jeremy Eaton Advisory Dr. Danny Butt Designer Carolyn Huane @carolynhuane Cover Photograph Jayde Kirchert Internal Cover Photographs Youjia Lu

Vibe. Southbank Arts Review

Editorial / VIBE Magazine

Editorial. Dear Reader,

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acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land upon which this publication has been created, the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri peoples of the Eastern Kulin Nation, whose songs have been sung, their dances danced and stories poured into this land for thousands of years. I pay my respects to their Elders, past and present. Sovereignty was never ceded; this was, is, and always will be, Aboriginal land. It is an absolute thrill to introduce this collection of writing from graduate researchers across both The Victorian College of the Arts and Melbourne Conservatorium of Music. This publication has been proudly led by graduate researchers, with the intention of providing an opportunity to give visibility and presence to the incredible artistic-led research practices taking place on our campus. It is my hope that this publication, and concurrent projects, might be a catalyst for the creation of larger, more diverse platforms for capturing and sharing knowledge, inspiration and insights gained from praxis. As artist-researchers we are tasked to access various modes of being and doing, often simultaneously. The tension and fluctuation that exists between subjective, embodied states and objective, high-octane intellectual rigour inevitably generates work that is deeply personal, considered and reflective. It is a wonderfully unique position to inhabit, however precarious it feels at times, and a magical place from which to allow new knowledge

to spring forth. By having resources like VIBE that capture and disseminate our processes and findings, we not only showcase the quality of the work taking place by our researchers but provide a sense of the growing research community within the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music; a community that is multifaceted, energetic, complex and dynamic. This publication would not be possible without the support of Dr Danny Butt, who has championed this project from its inception and generously provided ongoing guidance and mentorship. I would also like to thank Jeremy Eaton for his support and everfriendly assistance, particularly with his work on Currents, an affiliated peer-reviewed academic journal to launch early 2020. A huge thank you to the Editorial Committee for all of their invaluable advice along the way, for sharing networks and helping to establish new, necessary communication pathways across the campus. Lastly, I would like to congratulate each of the graduate researchers who have contributed to this collection. Thank you for your hard work and for the bravery in sharing material that by nature is work-in-progress; I’m very proud of the research that is presented here, and I hope you all are too. Kindest regards, Jonathan (Jonno) Graffam Chief Editor

Parallel Wiring Brazil and the Invention of the Solid Body Electric Guitar

Adam May Music Performance, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music (MCM) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate

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he sound of the Trio Elétrico is the sound of carnaval in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Bahia. In 1950 two local musicians, Dodô Nascimento and Osmar Macêdo, paraded during Salvador’s Carnival performing in a 1929 Ford equipped with two speakers. These speakers were amplifying their unique electric instruments; a solid body electric guitar trio of cavaquinho (the Brazilian soprano guitar), violão (the six-string guitar) and triolim (tenor guitar). This was the very first Trio Elétrico to perform in Bahia and from that moment Trio Elétricos and the guitarra baiana became synonymous with carnaval in Salvador and Brazil. During the 1930s and 40s when the electric guitar was being developed in North America, the electric guitarra baiana appeared independently in Salvador, Bahia. This curious coincidence has inspired claims that the solid-body electric guitar may have been invented in Brazil. The invention of the electric guitar in the 20th Century had an enormous impact on the practise, popularity and commercialisation of music. The relationship between the guitar and the listening public was forever altered with the introduction of electro-magnetic pickups, amplification and the solid body electric guitar, which reflected the changing times, both artistically and culturally (Brosnac 1975). The evolution of the guitar into an electronic instrument was inevitable; increased volume becoming a musical necessity with the expansion of the number of personal and instrumentation in bands during the 1930’s.

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Without going into advanced electronics and engineering, it is fair to say that the pickup is an essential element in any electric guitar. The magnetic field created by the pickup transforms the vibration of the string into an electronic signal that can then be amplified (Tolinski and Di Perna 2016). Traditional acoustic guitar building focuses on the soundboard as the source of tone production, and the early electric guitar experiments focused on attempts to amplify the vibrations of the guitar’s soundboard. However, it was George Beauchamp that realised the string is the best source of vibration (Tolinski and Di Perna 2016).

In 1930-31 Beauchamp had mounted his early pickup experiments on a piece of two-by-four inch timbre using just a single string as the source of vibration, with his design proving to be successful he went about building a full-sized guitar prototype. Tolinski and Di Perna (2016) suggest that while others had tried this kind of thing, it appears only Beauchamp followed through his experiment to its logical conclusion. Beauchamp enlisted the help of his friends, Aldoph Rickenbaker, Harry Watson and Paul Berth to design and build a full-size electric guitar. Together the four men created the Ro-Pat-In company. The initial design they came up with was the ‘Frying pan’ also called the ‘Panhandle’ and ‘Pancake’. These descriptive names appear apt as the instrument’s long neck and small circular body shape resembled a frying pan. The original proto-type was made from wood; however, the production models were made from aluminium, a result of the Ro-Pat-In legacy of having worked in The National String Instrument Corporation making cast-iron Dobro instruments (Tolinski and Di Perna 2016). The instrument was primarily designed for playing Hawaiian-style, that is horizontally on the lap, although it could also be played using a traditional posture, at the time referred to as Spanish Style. In 1932 the A-25 production model, 25 referring to the scale length in inches, was launched followed by the A-22 which went on to outsell the 25-inch model. The guitar was branded Ro-Pat-In, then Rickenbahcer and ultimately Rickenbacker Electro. The market in the early 1930’s was essentially professional players (Tolinski and Di Perna 2016). By 1935 Rival companies: Dobro, Gibson and Vivi-tone, Epiphone, Audiovox and Volu-tone had entered the market. Many of these models were based on Beauchamp’s original pick-up design. In 1935 Gibson launched the ES-150, ES stood for Electric Spanish, and 150 was the price of the amp/guitar package. The bar pickup with a long hexagonal shape has since become known as the ‘Charlie Christian pickup’. Twenty-two-year-old Charlie Christian

(1916-1942) played with Benny Goodman in 1939. There was the need to amplify Christian’s melodic single note improvisations and solo lines within the context of the swing big band (Chapman 2000). The body of these early electric guitars were all based on the design of the acoustic guitar, hence ES, or they were made of steel or aluminium. The Log and Paú Elétrico Osmar Alvares de Macêdo (1923-1997) was born in Santo Antonio, Salvador Bahia. He worked as a mechanical engineer and was an

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standard term for the electric guitar guitarra was yet to be used. The day after the concert Dodo and Osmar meet with Chaves and played his instrument and analysed the pickup technology (César 2011). Using their engineering and electronics knowledge they immediate constructed a reproduction of the imported system that Chaves used. Within days they had amplified their cavaquinho and violão adding the pickup across the sound hole of the instruments (Vieira 2011). During these initial experiments with the pickup on acoustic

The invention of the electric guitar in the 20th Century had an enormous impact on the practice, popularity and commercialisation of music.

amateur musician. In 1936 he performed in his first carnaval playing bandolim (mandolin) in the group Solo Melo (César 2011). By 1938 Osmar had met Aldolfo Antonio do Nascimento (1920—1978) commonly known as Dodô, who was an electrician by trade, and they formed a duo of guitar and cavaquinho (César 2011). The cavaquinho is the Brazilian soprano guitar with four single strings normally tuned Dgbd, however in Bahia it is often tuned in 5ths like the bandolim (mandolin) GDae (May 2013). Osmar claims he first saw the electric guitar in 1941 being played by Benedito Chaves, a professional musician from Rio de Janeiro, who was performing in Cine Guarany Teatro in the North-Eastern Brazilian state of Pernambuco. Osmar recalls that Chaves used a pickup across the sound hole of the guitar in combination with a microphone, the instrument was referred to as violão eletrizado, violão is the Portuguese word for an acoustic guitar. The now

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instruments Dodô and Osmar would use flannelette cloth or towels inside the body of the instruments to help stop feedback, an undesired result which was common as they tried to achieve more volume. Feedback is that often high-pitched howling sound that results when the sound frequencies produced by the pickups start interacting with the audio output of the amplifies speakers setting up what is called a transduction loop (Tolinski and Di Perna 2016). Dodô and Osmar realised, just as Beauchamp had, that they didn’t need the acoustic sound or vibrations of the top and body of the instrument, and that they only needed to capture the vibration of the string. Between 1941-42 the pair were removing the necks off cavaquinhos and guitars and sticking them to solid blocks of wood with the pickup attached. In 1943 they produced the first pau elétrico, known as the electric cavaquinho. This was the original guitarra baiana,

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Adam May / Music Performance

and together with the pau elétrico violão and an amplified violão tenor (tenor guitar) they were called the triolim. These three instruments were the original instrumentation in the first Trio Elétrico (Vieira 2011). The paú elétrico shares similarities with The Log that was designed by North American Les Paul 1939. During the 1930s Les Paul (1915- 2009) was a popular guitar player and fledgling inventor. A child prodigy, who by 1938 was featured with his trio ‘The Les Paul Trio’ three times a week on NBC radio. NBC was America’s first coast-to-coast radio network, and in the late thirties one of only three major radio networks in North America. In New York he was friends with Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. As with the other protagonists in this story, he too was unsatisfied with the equipment at the time. It was some time during 1939 that Les Paul attached a bridge, two self-made pickups and a Spanish guitar neck to a four-by-four-inch slab of pine (Tolinski and Di Perna 2016). He added two ‘wings’ off an Epiphone hollow-body guitar, possibly for aesthetic reasons, making it look more like a conventional guitar, or for practical reasons, making it more comfortable to play while seated (Tolinski and Di Perna 2016). This invention came to be known as The Log, and somewhere along the way the popular myth or misconception that Les Paul single-handedly invented the solid-body electric guitar emerged; something that Les Paul didn’t go out of his way to dispel. Les Paul claims he took his design to the Gibson factory in 1941, the same year Dodô and Osmar heard Benedito Chaves, however with WWII looming the timing wasn’t right and it would be another decade before the solid-body electric guitar would appear in North America. In 1946 Leo Fender launched The Fender electric Instrument company and in 1948 with his employee George Fullerton they had developed their prototype solid-body electric Spanish guitar and in 1950 the instrument launched as the Broadcaster it was renamed the Telecaster

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the following year and in 1952 Gibson launched the Les Paul model. Every year carnaval is celebrated throughout Brazil, although it is often associated with Rio de Janeiro and the Escola de Samba; Brazil’s second most popular carnaval celebration takes place in the streets of Salvador in the north-eastern Brazilian state of Bahia. In Salvador during the 1840s masked balls were celebrated by Bahian upper-class, while commoners celebrated outdoors with chaotic rough and dirty celebrations on the streets of Salvador, following in the tradition of the Portuguese entrudo (McGowan and Pessanha 1988). In 1884 the first Carnival parade took place, with floats parading and bands playing polkas and operatic overtures. In 1950 Dodô and Osmar along with Temístocles Aragão on triolim (electric tenor guitar) paraded during Salavador’s Carnival in what was the very first Trio Elétrico, a 1929 Ford equipped with two speakers. In 1952 the group paraded again during Carnival this time without Temístocles on tenor but retained the name Trio Eletrico (Marcon 2003). The repertoire they were performing was a combination of marchinhas, frevos and choros, high-energy fasttempo dance forms of Brazilian popular music. In 1964 Osmar’s 11-year-old son Armandinho Macêdo (1953-) playing the paú elétrico performed with Dodô and Osmar during carnaval. To accommodate Armandinho and his siblings, Dodô and Osmar converted a Ford F-1000 truck into a mini-trio elétrico (Marcon 2003). By this stage the primitive looking prototype paú elétrico had been converted to look like a small guitar and up until 1977 the instrument was still known as the cavaquinho elétrico. In 1978 the name guitarra baiana appeared on the back cover of the LP by Armandinho’s group A Cor do Som ‘Ao Vivo’ and the same year on the back cover of the LP Ligacão by Armandinho and Trio Elétrico, the name guitarra baiana was used by Osmar in his linear notes paying homage to Dodô who died that same year. In 1982 Armandinho asked luthier Vitorio Quentilo to build him a

Adam May / Music Performance

guitarra baiana with 5-strings, adding a lower C to the traditional mandolin tuning in fifths. 5-strings is now the standard for the guitarra baiana. Armandinho describes it as a mix between bandolim and cavaquinho (César 2011), on which he added a fifth string to create a truly original guitar. As Aroldo Macêdo, Armandinhos older brother and band mate explains, ‘there is the guitarra portuguese, guitarra americano and guitarra havaiano so they added their own creation to the list, the guitarra baiana’ (César 2011). Armandinho is primarily responsible for the continuing development of the instrument, mixing rock, jazz, prog, and classical themes with musica brasiliera, he has created a musical language that is a genuine hybrid. Although no individual can be credited as the inventor of the electric guitar, its history can be traced back to a small number of inquisitive minds, in collaboration with musicians and acoustic instrument builders. The curious case of Dodô and Osmar and their guitarra baiana, and the parallel invention of the North American solid body electric guitar, continues to generate speculation that the solid-body electric guitar first appeared in the North-east of Brazil. As Armandinho Macêdo told Bruce Gilman of Brazil magazine in a 2002 interview, “Dodô and Osmar never bothered to file a patent and allegedly, it wasn’t until the late 1940s that they became aware of the existence of solid body electric guitars in the U.S.” — Adam May is a Melbourne based musician with a Master of Music (ethnomusicology/musicology) from The University of Melbourne. A Brazilian music expert, Adam specialises in playing the Brazilian seven-string guitar and cavaquinho (Brazilian soprano guitar). From 2006 to 2008, Adam lived and travelled throughout Brazil researching and performing national and regional styles of music. Current activities include undertaking a PhD at the University of Melbourne. In 2017 Adam performed in Lisbon and recorded in Madeira, Portugal, and in 2018 he recorded in Yogyakarta, Indonesia with local Kroncong

musicians. Adam has just recently returned from a field trip and recording project in Brazil as part of his ongoing research. — Bibliography Brosnac, Donald. 1975. The Electric Guitar, 4th ed. San Francisco: Panjandrum Press. César, Eduardo. 2011. “Nem Choro, Nem Samba.” Documentário/ TCC/Project Experimental, 33.45. History of the Guitarra Baiana, interviews with Armandinho Macêdo. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=R3M32b6qRhI Chapman, Richard. 2000. Guitar: Music, History, Players. London: Dorling Kindersley. Gilman, Bruce. 2002. `Carnival Catalysts’, Brazzil. February 2002: 34-35. McGowan, Chris and Ricardo Pessanha. 1988. The Brazilian Sound. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Marcon, Lilian Cristina. 2003. “da phobica ao trio elétrico.” Accessed July 26, 2019. www.carnaxe.com.br/history/trio.html May, Adam. 2013. “The Brazilian seven-string guitar: Traditions, techniques and innovations.” MMus Thesis, Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, The University of Melbourne. Tolinski, Brad and Alan Di Perna. 2016. Play it Loud. New York: Doublebay. Vieira, Kim C. 2011. “Do Pau elétrico à Guitarra Baiana.” https://www. academia.edu/36978557/Do_pau_Ele_trico_a_Guitarra_Baiana.pdf

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Adam May / Music Performance

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Adam May / Music Performance

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The Existential Writer

Can an understanding of Irvin D Yalom’s four givens of existential psychotherapy influence the writing of a second draft of a screenplay? Ben Michael Film and Television, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Abstract

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xistential psychotherapist Irvin D Yalom believes basic human anxiety emerges from our endeavours to deal, both consciously and unconsciously, with what he calls the four givens of human existence—death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. As a screenwriter and academic with work that has been broadcast on TV and released theatrically I wanted to investigate what happens when an experienced writer goes beyond the film and television industry’s craft guidelines and screenwriting manuals for inspiration and guidance in the writing of a second draft of a screenplay. This paper is a summary of what I have learnt from Yalom’s existential theories and how this knowledge can be applied in the writing of a second draft of a screenplay that taps more deeply into the core concerns of human beings. It is hoped that this will become a new methodology for screenwriters. Keywords: existentialism, existential psychotherapy, screenwriting, Irvin D Yalom, Ernest Becker, terror management theory, Sheldon Solomon, death, freedom, isolation, meaninglessness The Problem What we need today is no less than a revolution. We need to do violence to the cliché, create havoc with the tried, the tired, and tested. (Horton 1994, 1) Twenty-five years ago, academic Andrew Horton’s book, Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay (1994) argued that Hollywood’s conservative obsession with endlessly recycling films that unimaginatively copy previous movies was leading to the death of cinema for adult audiences, that films had become plot-centred at the expense of character. Horton believes the way forward is to write screenplays with richer, deeper and more complex characters. John Yorke, TV producer, creator of the BBC Writers’ Academy and author of the book, Into The Woods (2013) shares similar sentiments: ‘without credible, vibrant, exciting, living, breathing, empathetic characters, drama simply doesn’t work’ (Yorke 2013, 124).

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With these, and many more theorists as inspiration, my research mission was to find a new way of looking at screenwriting that could help writers better understand the human mind in order to create more compelling characters and write more engaging narratives. The fields of psychology, the scientific study of the human mind and its functions, and psychotherapy, the treating of mental health problems by talking with a psychologist or psychiatrist, seemed like fertile areas to aid this process. Psychology/psychotherapy and screenwriting: the same thing? What became clear early in my research is that psychology and psychotherapy share similar aims to that of the screenwriter. Part of my methodology included informal meetings with Chief Operating Officer/Senior Psychologist Ms. Prashnitha Prakash. During our first encounter, a conversation where I took notes, Nitha revealed that what she is trying to achieve with a client is to hold up a mirror to them, so they may see themselves as they truly are. This is, in Nitha’s opinion, one of the most important breakthroughs in the psychotherapeutic process. The best screenwriting seeks the same aim: the audience will see themselves reflected in the characters of the film and this will enable them to make sense of their own lives. Esteemed writer David Mamet believes this is the reason we tell stories: to make sense of the world. We dramatise the weather, the traffic, and other impersonal phenomena by employing exaggeration, ironic juxtaposition, inversion, projection, all the tools the dramatist uses to create, and the psychoanalyst uses to interpret, emotionally significant phenomena. (Mamet 1998, 4) The theory that psychologists and writers are more similar than many would believe is explored in academic William Indick’s book, Psychology for Screenwriters (2004). Any task that deals mainly in creative interpretation and extrapolation is inherently subjective, and therefore not an objective science. True psychoanalysis is not a science… it is an art. In this sense, psychoanalysis and screenwriting are two sides of the same coin.

They are both creative arts aimed at the investigation and understanding of the human character, mind and soul. They are both intrinsically engaged in the personality and personal development of their subjects. They are both immersed in the world of archetypal symbols and mythological figures. And they are both rooted firmly in the unconscious realm of human experience. (Indick 2004, xii) Jason Lee, in his book, Psychology of Screenwriting (2013) furthers the idea of clear similarities. Fundamentally, the essence of producing good writing is understanding psychology, your own and that of others, the two being indivisible. Otherwise the writer produces flat caricatures that are just moving through films, without any depth, unbelievable to an audience. This

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and meaninglessness. A writer who understands why these givens cause us so much anxiety and how they drive our behaviour, can approach screenwriting with a new found emotional depth. If you tell stories that tap into our deepest fears, you can touch audiences in profound, visceral and primal ways. Methodology I wrote a feature film based on all my screenwriting knowledge and industry experience gained before this research. I then studied the four givens, looking at why they cause anxiety, how they motivate behaviour, in particular negative defence mechanisms and what can be done to accept and/or transcend them in order to live a more authentic life. The existential psychotherapeutic approach posits that the therapist must locate and examine how the four givens affects them in order to better understand the way they are

The best screenwriting seeks the same aim: the audience will see themselves reflected in the characters of the film and this will enable them to make sense of their own lives.

tells us nothing about the human condition and is destructive. (Lee 2013, 9) To discover that psychology was able to aid the screenwriter was heartening but a problem soon arose. The fields of psychology/ psychotherapy were too vast. To arrive at a clear set of principles for approaching the second draft I needed to narrow my focus. Irvin D Yalom and existential psychotherapy Yalom is an esteemed professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, a practicing therapist and a writer of both academic theories and fiction. Yalom’s seminal 1980 book, Existential Psychotherapy (1980) became the guiding light of my new methodology. Yalom’s existential approach posits that conflict flows from our confrontation with what he calls the four givens of existence. Death, freedom, isolation

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playing out in the client they are treating. How does one discover the nature of these (four) givens? The method is deep personal reflection. The conditions are simple: solitude, silence, time, and freedom from the everyday distractions with which each of us fills his or her experiential world. If we can brush away or “bracket” the everyday world, if we reflect deeply upon our “situation” in the world, upon our existence, our boundaries, our possibilities, if we arrive at the ground that underlies all other ground, we invariably confront the givens of existence. (Yalom 1980, 8) This was a revelatory moment regarding the methodology that I would employ for this research-led creative project. Before I used the research to better understand my fictional characters, their deep motivations and how this might influence the redrafting

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Ben Michael / Film & Television

process, I would first find the time, space and right frame of mind to go deep inside myself and confront how the four givens have affected me. I would seek to understand myself before I tried to understand my characters. This process provided me with one of the most profoundly important breakthroughs of my creative and academic life. I need to observe, feel and understand the greatest concerns of existence before I use them to fuel my writing. Once I had gone deep inside myself I was then able to start looking at how the four givens could be used to write a more compelling second draft. In order to demonstrate how this can be done I will give a brief over view of each given, what they teach us about human behaviour and how they can be used to ask insightful questions of our first draft. Death The fear of death plays a major role in our internal experience; it haunts as does nothing else; it rumbles continuously under the surface; it is a dark unsettling presence at the rim of consciousness. (Yalom 1980, 27) Yalom believes that ‘death is the primordial source of anxiety and, as such, is the primary fount of psychopathology’ (Yalom 1980, 27). He uses the theories of philosopher Martin Heidegger to explain that there are two fundamental modes of existing, one that supresses thoughts of death, which Heidegger calls forgetfulness of being. In this state one ‘lives in the world of things and immerses oneself in the everyday diversions of life. One surrenders oneself to the everyday world, to a concern about the way things are’ (Yalom 1980, 31). We hide from death in material goods, religion, politics, drugs and any number of other behaviours in order to turn away from the harsh truth of our mortality. Social psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenburg and Tom Pyszcznski detailed the behaviours people engage do to avoid death when they expanded on cultural anthropologist Ernest Beck’s theories in his book The Denial of Death (1973). Through a series of tests they showed that people who were reminded of their mortality become more racist, more rigid in their political beliefs, more interested in material goods and money. This research was able to finally prove that death avoidance motivates many negative behaviours. For a screenwriter this is powerful knowledge. Most fictional characters, and the authors who invented them, exist in the forgetfulness of being and almost all of their desires and behaviours, in one way or another are motivated by death avoidance. When I was confronting my attitudes to death I reached new levels of self-awareness about my past behaviours. I thought death hadn’t touched me but in truth it was, as Yalom suggests, always lurking just below the surface. To understand how your character feels about death and how it motivates their actions, either consciously or unconsciously, is a powerful screenwriting tool. It gives weight and meaning to character choices. To tell a story that forces your character confront mortality and live

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a more meaningful life, can be a valuable cathartic lesson for an audience. This state of existence is one of ‘mindfuless of being, one marvels not about the way things are but that they are. To exist in this mode means to be continually aware of being’ (Yalom 1980, 31). Death gives the writer clear questions to ask of their draft. How does my character hide from death? How is their behaviour, moment by moment, choice by choice, driven by death denial? How might I deepen my story so either my character, or the audience watching them, is able to see a way of existing beyond the forgetfulness of being? Freedom As first glance, freedom seems an unlikely cause of anxiety, as Yalom himself states in his book detailing ten existential therapeutic encounters Love’s Executioner (2012). ‘Freedom as a given seems the very antithesis of death. While we dread death, we generally consider freedom to be unequivocally positive’ (Yalom, 2012, xvi). But existential freedom is, as French existentialist John Paul Sartre believes, something we are condemned to. This is because existential freedom ‘extends beyond being responsible for the world (that is for imbuing the world with significance): one is also entirely responsible for one’s life, not only for one’s actions but for one’s failures to act’ (Yalom 1980, 220). Yalom believes that understanding what freedom really means forces us to take responsibility for our life and actions and inactions. In short, we are the authors of our lives and this terrifies us. If we have no one to blame for our predicament we are forced to take stock of what we have done. To analyse all the choices a character makes in a screenplay and what motivated them is very useful when redrafting. Academic and writer William Rabkin notes in his screenwriting book Writing the Pilot (2011) that what defines a character is ‘his goal and the choices he makes in trying to obtain them. Everything else is just talk’ (Rabkin 2011, 33). Existential psychotherapy suggests that if freedom is one of the ultimate concerns of existence then if follows that audiences, either consciously or unconsciously, will be moved and take note of the choices, actions and inactions of characters in a film. Thus, the writer had best make one’s characters make as many choices as possible and that those choices are as truthfully motivated as possible. This alone is a great craft tool when looking for ways to make a screenplay more compelling. But there is another, deeper, use for understanding existential freedom in a screenplay. When one becomes acutely aware of all the decisions one makes, moment by moment and the fact one has agency in these decisions, one starts to truly live in the moment. No longer are base needs and fears what drive our decisions but a more careful and considered approach to choice, action and inaction. The stakes for acceptance of freedom or responsibility avoidance are high, as Yalom states, ‘to flee from our freedom is to live “inauthentically” (Heidegger) or in “bad faith” (Sartre)’ (Yalom 1980, 222). Yalom believes it is the project of the psychotherapist to liberate individuals from this bad faith and help them assume responsibility. But how often do films

Ben Michael / Film & Television

truly force a character to accept existential freedom? How often do films force the audience to look at their actions and choices? Too often the hero merely overcomes a flaw and defeats the antagonist. They are triumphant without the need to take stock of what role they played in the trouble they faced. Using existential freedom can help make a screenplay more nuanced, less dualistic. It radically changed my first draft. Isolation

are, where they come from and how they use them to justify their actions? Without meaning we face crippling uncertainty or as Yalom states: ‘This existential dilemma—a being who searches for meaning and certainty in a universe that has neither—has tremendous relevance for the profession of psychotherapist’ (Yalom 2012, xxi). If the profession of psychotherapist and that of the screenwriter share, as has already been suggested, so much common ground, then it is the job of the screenwriter to look at meaninglessness in all its guises in the screenplays they write.

One can experience interpersonal isolation, which is isolation from other individuals, or intrapersonal isolation which is a process whereby one partitions off parts of oneself but ‘existential isolation refers to an unbridgeable gulf between oneself and any other being. It refers, too, to an isolation even more fundamental-a separation between the individual and the world’ (Yalom 1980, 355). ‘Existential isolation is a vale of loneliness which has many approaches. A confrontation with death and with freedom will inevitably lead the individual into that vale’ (Yalom 1980, 356). This harsh reality is made more difficult when one considers humanity’s deep desire for connection. To be able to hold these two contradictory forces in the one hand brings the insight that facing the truth of isolation makes connection with others all the more significant. When looking at a scene, or a screenplay overall, it is of great benefit to gauge if a character’s behaviour is driven by isolation, and/or causing further isolation. And what might happen if a character truly faces the horror of their separateness from the world? Might it make any connection they encounter all the more valuable? Might it make the audience learn to value those they are connected to more vigorously? Films are about connection. We are alone in the dark watching the film but we are also sharing the experience with others. Or as Mamet says of going to the theatre, ‘We’re all here to undergo a communion, to find out what the hell is going on in this world’ (Mamet, 1998, 19). Understanding isolation is difficult but it’s rewards are profound. True connection means nothing unless you have felt true existential isolation. ‘The ability to be alone is the condition for the ability to love’ (Yalom, 1980, 398). My lead character is a loner from an abusive family. My story, once informed by the four givens, is about how she comes to accept this and finally connect to someone who truly cares for her.

Conclusion

Meaninglessness

Mamet, David. 1998. 3 Uses of the Knife, 1st edn, New York, NY: Samuel French.

Yalom believes humans are meaning seeking creatures and that ‘biologically, our nervous systems are organised in such a way that the brain automatically clusters incoming stimuli into configurations’ (Yalom 2012, xxi). This notion sparked a revelation about the structure of screenplays and story itself. Are they not a writer’s need to take a selection of plot points and build them into a narrative that both escalates and makes logical sense? And on a character level, can thinking about the meaning a character gives to their actions, or the meaning they have projected onto something or someone they encounter, bring a clearer sense of what their motivations

After studying the four givens I realised my main character is isolated, gives meaning to her life by embarking on a journey of brutal revenge, blames the actions of others for her predicament, thus refusing to confront her existential freedom and is driven by a extreme case of death avoidance. In short, everything in my screenplay deals, in one way or another, with the four givens. My second draft would be about making the connections stronger and using them to deepen the emotional impact of the script. — Ben has written, edited, plotted and script produced over two thousand hours of broadcast television. He has co-produced and co-written the award winning feature film Is This The Real World. He is currently contracted to write three feature films. He is head lecturer for the Masters of Screenwriting at VCA and is currently midway through his doctorate, also at the VCA. He is a musician and animal rights activist. — Bibliography Becker, Ernest. 1972. The Birth and Death of Meaning, 2nd edn, New York, NY: Free Press. Becker, Ernest. 1997. The Denial of Death, 1st edn, New York, NY: Free Press.

Solomon, Sheldon, Jeff Greenburg and Tom Pyszcznski. 2015. The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life, 1st edn, New York, NY: Random House. Yalom, Irvin. 1980. Existential Psychotherapy, 1st edn. New York, NY: BasicBooks. Yalom, Irvin. 2012. Love’s Executioner, 1st edn. New York, NY: BasicBooks.

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Translation of text into punched card code

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Streaming Data is the Ultimate Trust Exercise with the Moon Corinna Berndt Visual Arts, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate

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his article evaluates a recent series of tests undertaken during a research residency in Berlin, Germany. During the residency, I produced 3D scans of an arbitrary collection of small personal objects, which I then assembled into a catalogue of transcribed data. The 3D scans were taken of objects such as my toothbrush, an overripe peach and a bag of 5 cent pieces. The tests were intended to explore how concepts of database and narrative might co-exist, as a means to develop a hybrid poetics between computerised information, material objects, immaterial memory and implied narrative. I also investigated methods of bringing data back into the physical realm by transforming a piece of text into punched code which I laser cut into paper. The residency presented part of my research into cyber myths of the 1990s, exploring the continuing impact historical techno-imaginaries might produce in Western culture. Specifically, my research examines how these techno imaginaries might still parallel and construct contemporary hopes and fears concerning communication, technology, subjectivity and the limits of the body in the 21st century. Database and the storing of information The storing of digital information suggests an archive, or a database through which files can be accessed in any given order. As Lev Manovich argues in his essay, ‘Database as Symbolic Form’ (1999), the concept of the database presents a new symbolic form for how we might structure and navigate the world. The idea of understanding the world as a “list of items”, however contrasts other culturally significant forms of meaning-making, such as narrative. In narrative, information is organised in a ‘cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events).’ (1999, 85) As Manovich suggests, a new understanding of meaning making might be found when examining how linear narrative and database function together as a hybrid system. E-hoarding or digital hoarding are terms that have started circulating in recent years. Digital hoarding describes a phenomenon in which the collection of material possessions has been replaced by an accumulation of data. Arguably, digital hoarding, the de-materialisation of physical possessions, and their

transformation into digital collections, suggest implied narratives that are embedded within the material world. It is through the absence of narratives that these relationships to the material world continue to exist within the digital archive. As such, collecting 3D scans of my personal belongings in order to build a digital database of them presents a helpful structure for investigating contemporary convergences between material and digital bodies and their networked relationships. Working with 3D scanning has the potential to generate hybrid forms of bodied and disembodied information. It also calls forth an examination of what kind of languages, grammar and poetics might govern these hybrid forms. Studio tests: dematerialising information For a period of 3 months, I collected 3D scans of small personal objects, using a 3D scanning mobile phone app. The scans produced recordings of the objects’ volume in space through photogrammetry. In photogrammetry a computer program stitches together two-dimensional visual information, in order to create a three-dimensional model, which then can be digitally manipulated as well as printed. Due to the low quality of my mobile phone camera, the resulting 3D scans only coarsely resembled the object’s form. As a result of the low-quality recording, the scans were lacking textural details and displayed glitches in various areas. They appeared like blind scans of the objects and had a fossil-like appearance, which made them partly unrecognisable. The act of assembling a database of erroneous information and glitched scans of my belongings, poses questions relating to the value of the collected information. Simultaneously, the scanning process produces a new materiality that emerges when objects become transformed into a computerised 3D model. As N. Katherine Hayles points out in relation to media specific computational data, materiality ‘occupies a borderland—or better, performs as connective tissue—joining the physical and mental, the artefact and the user’ (2004, 72). In this case, the object becomes obscured by the glitch. It resists being classified as belonging to a specific taxonomy and becomes illegible information. The loss in information thus produces a tension between the ‘physical and mental, the artefact and the user’, (72) at

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Corinna Berndt / Visual Arts

the same time the error introduces new narratives, and taxonomies for the scanned objects. The scanning exercise revealed that when creating a database of glitched information, Manovich’s concept of

parts, tissues, knee-caps, rings, tubes, levers, and bellows. It’s also full of itself: that’s all it is. 4.

A body’s immaterial. It’s a drawing, a contour, an idea.

Nancy’s contemplation of the body could also be applied to non-human bodies, such as the bodies of objects that surround us, as well as their absences. As Nancy suggests above, the void itself is a ‘subtle kind of body’. When working with digital 3D scanning, a glitch in the data also suggests a void. It is an indication of that which is missing. The glitch belongs to the unspoken, the misheard, it belongs to the gap and slippage in information. The void accumulates at the bottom of the scans, where the scanner does not reach or cannot read, thus opening up a space for the speculative.

Samples of 3D scanned objects, such as grapes, a hairbrush, a blossom, a cobble stone, a bread roll, a bag of broad beans, a peach, a bag of coins, a powder brush, a scarf, a container with soap.

hybrid forms of meaning-making is further complicated through the machine created error, producing a collection of liminal bodies.

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The act of assembling a database of erroneous information and glitched scans of my belongings, poses questions relating to the value of the collected information.

Absence of information: object-bodies and the glitch Jean Luc Nany (2008) states that:

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1.

A body’s material. It’s dense. It’s impenetrable. Penetrate it, and you break it, puncture it, tear it.

2.

A body’s material. It’s off to one side. Distinct from other bodies. A body begins and ends against another body. The void itself is a subtle kind of body.

3.

Unlike a linguistic assembling and disassembling of information, the visual scanning of my objects produced partly illegible information. Errors in the 3D models and the slippages in the scanned data made it difficult to name and to determine the material origins of the 3D models. This emphasises that even though the 3D scanning technology has no direct sense of agency, it still has the potential to create accidental mis-readings and errors that are beyond the control of the human user. The human-technology interaction taking place during the act of 3D scanning, thus also creates new narratives and meaning for the objects as

A body isn’t empty. It’s full of other bodies, pieces, organs,

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they become part of my database of partly illegible, digitalised belongings. Punched card code as a means to materialise digital information In addition to experimenting with 3D punched card code, I further explored ideas of translation and mistranslation, by translating text-based data into a physical form. As a means to materialise digital information, I used a piece of text which I translated into an IBM punched card code pattern. Historically, in early computing, punched card code—or Hollerith

Corinna Berndt / Visual Arts

code—was employed for storing data as early computers only had a very limited amount of memory. Data was stored on the paper via a pattern of holes, corresponding to a character encoding system, which functioned similar to Morse code. The data was stored in the cards by punching holes. The cards could then be fed into a card reader which transmitted the code into the computer for data processing applications (Heath 1972). In order to transform my writing into the historical punched code, I worked with a web-based code generator and then laser-cut the pattern into paper. I found that when repeating the sentence 15 times, the encoded text amounted to a 15-metre-long pattern. My self-devised Hollerith strip made visible the amount of space required for this now obsolete data storage system. By translating my writing into a 15-metre-long punched code pattern on paper, I was also able to give a physical presence to the decoded message, converting what was once digital, intangible information on my computer, into a sculptural form within the gallery space. The process of translating my digital text into punched code involved creating a hand-made template for the laser cutting. As such, producing the encoded paper without having access to the now mostly obsolete keypunch equipment also very likely introduced errors and mistranslations into the pattern I created, which would render some of the data encoded in the paper as illegible. In addition to referencing the historical invention of the first computers and the development of binary code, transforming my writing into the laser-cut pattern also points towards the increasingly intangible methods of data storage. Binary code constructs the information we see when we read, write or look at images on the computer screen. The act of making an impractically long punch card foregrounds the invisible processes that occur in everyday operations of digital technology and data storage. Reproducing an obsolete media for storing data, such as in this case, the Hollerith strip, also juxtaposes today’s seemingly elusive nature of data storage and computer memory, and its relationship to material objects. The work thus focuses on the mostly unseen processes that occur when recording information with digital technology. Simultaneously it explores the occurrence of techno-nostalgia when material processes become increasingly intangible. To summarise, the studio tests helped explore the relationship between different methods of information production and storage. The studio tests included a collection of 3D scans of my personal

belongings, as well as a text, translated into punched card code. Together, these works investigate concepts of the digital database and its seemingly elusive and intangible nature when contrasted by now obsolete methods of data storage. The tests also revealed the introduction of errors and mistranslation. In addition, the tests implied a sense of techno-nostalgia suggesting a tension between the material object, data-storage within material products and the visualisation of encoded data. As such, the tests pose further questions concerning the imaginary of data as immaterial cloudlike memory, due to the elusive and mostly invisible nature of information storage when interacting with personal electronic devices. Specifically, the occurrence of mistranslation and glitches, appearing during the interaction between human and computational processes, highlights their potential to open themselves up to a speculative poetics and to producing new kinds of glitched data-bodies. — Corinna Berndt is a Melbourne-based visual artist and current PhD candidate at the Faculty of Fine Art and Music, the University of Melbourne, Australia. Working predominantly with digital media, her practice investigates the tension between corporeal and digital experiences, exploring poetic moments of convergence that occur between objects and bodies and between physical and intangible material. — Bibliography Heath, F. G. 1972. “ORIGINS OF THE BINARY CODE.” Scientific American 227 (2): 76-83. Manovich, Lev. 1999. “Database as Symbolic Form.” Convergence 5 (2): 80–99. Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2008. “Indices 1-4” excerpted from ‘Fifty-eight Indices on the Body’. Corpus, Quoted in Russel, Legacy. 2017. ‘On #GLITCHFEMINISM and The Glitch Feminism Manifesto. BeingRes. Accessed November 2019. http://beingres.org/2017/10/17/ legacy-russell/ Hayles, N. Katherine. 2004. “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis”. Poetics Today 25 (1): 67–90.

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Moving Through the Crystal Ball The Circular Realities of Immanent Feminist Spirituality and Embodied Art Practice Kellie Wells Visual Arts, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate

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his is a studio-based PhD Project which aims to make artistic and scholarly contributions to the field of practice-led research in contemporary art. The stepping off point for the research is a targeted investigation into ways Western academic traditions have historically erased and certain spiritual and mystical concepts within the cultural field of art production. My examination centres on arguments and evidences outlining particular conditions, customs and trajectories of academic thought which have effectively diminished and/or distorted sacred narratives of a female or femme subjectivity, symbolic language, visionary concepts and embodied or immanent spiritual knowledges. The project’s initial responses to the delimited framework of female spiritual representation is a conceiving of a new symbolic language of sacred desires presented as a realised art project. My creative speculations are located within a studio-practice of self-study that performs and images its own self-generated systems from within a spherical and generative field of reforming and reimagining othered, buried or suppressed spiritual subjectivities. This speculative, creative research endeavors to enfold multiple enactments of a performed identity back into a singular subjective self from a number of differing temporal and imagined locations. Via orbs, spheres and circles as visual motifs and signifiers of movement and renewal; a cyclic or circular understanding and experience of time is given conceptual primacy in the project in order to overturn or invert existing fixed, linear and historically prescribed spiritual narratives. Leading from the art-studio are embodied processes which resituate the feminine self/subject within a creative praxis of ritualised modes and gestures framed as methods of self-creation or actualisation. The studio strategies aim to produce art works from juncture points between personal memory, spiritual genealogy or ancestral traditions and historical mysticism in art. These prompts are developed in the studio to create performed still and moving images which encourage further provocations and parameters for embracing contemplative, spiritual and mystery practices, as relevant and important to academic art theory and critical thinking today.

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The project’s creative initiations extend out of a growing body of critical voices specialising in feminist theology, mystical traditions, psychoanalysis and nonrational knowing and draw on a range of

scholarship in the domain of intersectional theory and gendered, classed and colonial subjugations of certain bodies of knowledge. Recognition of a diminished feminine symbolic language is addressed in line with French feminist philosopher, psychoanalyst and linguist Luce Irigaray, specifically at key intersection points of her ongoing project (1974-2019) to this field of inquiry. Michel Foucault (1980, 82) describes intelligences that are erased or dismissed by the dominant culture as ‘subjugated knowledge’, i.e. ways of knowing that the world has purposefully and sometimes violently erased or passed over in the construction of the dominant culture of that particular era. With this in mind I turn to deep and dark histories of some of the earliest traditions for significant art, texts, practices and stories which carry the vibrations and resonances of ancient feminine knowledge and quiet but powerful echoes of hidden magical memories. I am seeking particular ways in which non-phallocentric ontologies and epistemologies have been sustained and nurtured by rituals, oral traditions and both solitary and collectivist practices; particularly forms of knowledge rooted in notions of an embodied or immanent feminist spirituality. Also sitting within the parameters of this project is an exploration into the nature of contemplative and imaginative self-study when it is named and structured as a sacred, productive mimetic occupation; in doing so I am identifying the material of self with God or divine experience and claiming an embodied space which is neither heretical nor narcissistic but rather creative and generative. This rich terrain holds many possibilities for an exploration of traditions and beliefs located within healing medicines, sorcery, the occult, witches, pagan spiritual beings and any other number of phenomenological modes and wisdoms. Each of these offer a symbolic approach to the natural universe that is a horizontal—not vertical— set of relationships to God, the divine or spiritual phenomena. It is immanent and material, and located within alternate dimensions of the self and nature rather than transcendent, hierarchical and outside or beyond nature. A research stratum of interest to me is a very specific exploration of the coded aesthetic traditions, found within the shrouded or historically eclipsed symbolic languages of cloistered nuns and medieval female mystics. This interest although deeply personal, derives from existing published provocations, that this category of female contribution to Western Europe’s intellectual, religious and aesthetic development was, until recent years, obliterated by

patriarchal academic, theological power. This, as a result, diminished the relevant narratives, creative and intellectual work of a number of historical women—Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) and Julien of Norwich (1342-1416) amongst others. I am tracing a path through both sanctioned and peripheral systems, putting female mysticism and religious ecstasies on a continuum through historically feminine bodies of knowledge of witchcraft and healing, to the modern religious orders of nuns and Sisters. I recognise and acknowledge that these codes and mysterious rhythms of these women were potent educational and mythic presences within my own deeply ritualised family and school upbringing. Within this practice-led research project I have no desire to write a theological or political treatise, nor colonise or appropriate other cultural and spiritual symbols or traditions. I instead respectfully frame my position from within my own genealogy, memory and ancestral stories and do so with open-eyed recognition of the freedoms I have been afforded and my existing privileged status and power. In plotting a course through this project, I am conscious

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intellectual pursuit and inherited subjective narrative. Historically coming out of a Catholic education and socialisation I found women represented and occupying space through their pain, suffering, sacrifice and duty or by their capacity to act as a foil or mirror reflecting the greater stories and culture of men. Within this version of spiritual thought and religious education I felt there was no place, no vision and no empowered narrative which I could personally acknowledge, respond or aspire to. Corporal punishment still existed in my primary school years, which inextricably linked spiritual teaching and education, pain and punishment in my memory. Complicating this was my witnessing the diminishing power and respect of the nuns as a resource as these women made an obvious retreat from their problematic outward facing positions in the school as their roles became less supported, less relevant and/or required. Years later, making a series of artworks around the suppressive bind of female representation in art and culture, I recognised I have a longstanding interest in challenging restricting frameworks as they apply to my personal evolution, and as part of

As an artist who conceives works as ideas to be inescapably experienced through their making, I draw deeply from embodied learnings that have shaped my thinking.

of my positioning and will not tell spiritual or cultural stories that are not mine to tell. My aim here is to keep learning strategies that stretch out the spaces between feeling and language and the sites and articulations which allow and recognise the spiritual, the personal, the contemplative, the ‘otherworldly’ or felt places beyond the mind, and, via creation of art works visualise and include their potent value to the landscape of the academic, the rational and the logical. As an artist who conceives works as ideas to be inescapably experienced through their making, I draw deeply from embodied learnings that have shaped my thinking. I consciously address the lifelong tensions between my own sense of identity as an artist, as a woman and as a self-recognised spiritual being. My art practice is being directly challenged to see what possibilities (if any) are available when specific, creative or aesthetic considerations are operating within a paradigm of occupying the spiritual realm,

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the collective evolution of the female or femme subjectivity as a lived experience. In her article Torture the Women (2010) curator and writer Phip Murray reviewed earlier works in my practice in this vein. In videos like Trying to Be Beautiful While My Hand is Burning (2007), Embellir (2007), Exigence (2008), The Hanging Head of St Julia (2009), The Joy of Living (2009) and The Blue Lady (2009) through arduous actions and bodily constraint I have consistently represented my experience of cultural and psychological restrictions and definitions that bind and limit the self. Even videos of more recent years, such as I am that I am (2012), Pilgrimage (2016) and Looking into the Sun (2017), the goal of my own self/subject’s psychic and cultural emancipation has been attempted and performed via repetitive gestures, endless movement and searching or relentless staring at something that will simply burn out my eyes if I do not turn away. Still caught within the fixed gaze of our visual culture, I have remained a mythical

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Kellie Wells / Visual Arts

yet ageing Medusa looking into the mirror/lens of the camera and turning myself into stone. This project’s connection to an expanded feminine genealogy far greater than personal history, provides the creative opportunity to accept a place in a lineage that stretches not decades but centuries; providing context for spiritual practices from which to derive meaning as well as a new language for desire for this kind of creative expression. Conceiving a new language of desire for that which is hidden or ‘othered’ claims a space of visibility in which to

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I recognise within any form of psychoanalytic model the subjective self is in constant dialogue with its own processing and memory archives.

represent what exists in any journey through the self. Like many other artists I incorporate myself into my art as a way to illustrate the close relationship between creative processes and self-meditation. Claiming this space becomes a way of seeing into and through the self for new and expansive modes of making and thinking. Art theorist Danielle Knafo describes this as ‘the intimate connection between the self and creativity, self and other, private and public, image and medium’ (2009, 20). I recognise within any form of psychoanalytic model the subjective self is in constant dialogue with its own processing and memory archives. So it is that many of the works for this new project are rising out of persistent personal memories which have been unearthed, acknowledged and artistically invested in for new knowledge. These internal processes are in turn engaging with a constantly shifting set of self-referential negotiations with time, place, identity and personal agency. With this understanding I am consciously relearning some of the rites, rituals and codes from my past faith practices as well as researching lived practices of ceremonial and bodily wisdoms from ancient and deep temporal locations. I am in the early days of developing various methods of anchoring this work back into the studio to clearly identify where and how the female self/subject is both situated and operates from. From inside to outside, from outside to inside and all this without the involvement of anything that moves from one place to another, but only a place of passage itself, and its movement.

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To date, there have been various successful and unsuccessful strategies deployed to construct videos, images, audio and a fully installed exhibition. In order to find approaches that engage deeply with the research I have opened up my existing studio methods, allowing all modes of being to merge. What I have kept consciously separate in the past, for this project, I am allowing to come together. In the studio I am constructing performed and occupied identities, not to fix in place as masquerade but rather to pass through like a doorway or portal in order to occupy a new embodied feminine subject position. The works created that are in obvious transaction

(Irigaray 1993, 70)

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with the researched properties of circular histories or realties, are those that appear to go down, into, or through themselves to open up new ways of being.

Ursula’s Dance (2019) is a recent work which attempts to demonstrate my creative understanding and response to ‘productive mimesis’ (Robinson 2006, 8) as an effective strategy or method employable within a studio art practice. This terminology has long been associated with certain human acts of social behavior i.e. the performance and re-performance of identity and the summoning of otherness within the medium of self (Larlham 2012, 1). Ursula’s Dance (2019) presents a memory from childhood, unearthed, reinvested and reimagined as a mystical dance in a continual video loop. Swaying slowly to music in inky blackness, my face, chest and hands are lit and transfigured by warm light emanating from within or inside the boundaries of the body, not from the external, darkened world. I have enfolded my female self/image in the black robes of mystical medieval practice within a space that is all at once occult, ritualised, intimately feminine and un-ending. Ursula’s Dance (2019) references an experience of otherness from my own memory but also draws deeply from another time, place, memory or association potentially sparked in the mind of the observer. The second work I have selected to illustrate my early engagement with the research is Through Catherine (2019), a photographic image in which my face is lit from behind rather than frontally as with conventions of standard photographic portraits. The bright bindings of light wrapped tightly and solidly around the neck and head almost

Kellie Wells / Visual Arts

sever my face from its moorings and deny its fixed representation as singular portrait. Instead my own face has become an inverted dark cameo with fleshy ears and fingers, semi-transparent and red from light through blood. The portrait, although darkened, is not flat and devoid of detail, but rather, is activated and becomes a black mirror through which to see into other dimensions; the deeper you look into the darkened space the more potential for re-imagining the female subject waiting there. My hope is that these figures as dark spaces operate not as a void of emptiness but rather as the metaphoric blind spot, or the third eye’s pineal gateway to the brain or the spirit or otherworld. This portal becomes the fertile tunnel (Jay 1993, 12-13) or perhaps the ultimate female signifier; beyond Plato’s Cave (Plato’s Republic 514a–520a) into a creative matrix through which we make pilgrimage beyond the historical positioning of the feminine as symbolic ‘other’ in relation to Western visual culture’s powerful gaze. And by further understanding existing alternate modes of embodied spiritual experience and temporal knowledge-making we create greater space for the hidden or subjugated others who have operated in this internal realm for centuries. — Kellie Wells is a multi-disciplinary artist and current PhD candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), University of Melbourne and holds an MFA (Visual Art) 2016 and BFA (Drawing) 2008 from VCA, University of Melbourne and BA (Political Science) 1995 University of Tasmania. In 2017 Kellie was awarded the Fiona Myer International Studio Residency for her MFA Research project; From the Selfie to The Spiritual: Contemplating Female SelfRepresentation in a Digital World. Recent public solo exhibitions include; The Corners of the Room, at Phasmid Studio Gbr, Berlin 2017; Looking into the Sun at St Heliers Gallery, the Abbotsford Convent 2017; Scrying/Self at Seventh Gallery 2017 and Traveling The Alpha Layer: a collaborative project on female centred video art at Counihan Gallery 2018. — Bibliography Foucault, Michel, and Colin Gordon. 1980. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. Brighton, England: Harvester Press.

Hildegardis Bingensis. 2003. Scivias. Edited by A. Führkötter and A. Carlevaris, Corpus Christianorum Scholars Version vols. 43, 43A. Turnhout: Brepols. Hildegardis Bingensis. 1995. Liber vitae meritorum. Edited by A. Carlevaris. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CCCM 90. Turnhout: Brepols. Hildegardis Bingensis. 1996. Liber divinorum operum. Edited by A. Derolez and P. Dronke, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis CCCM 92. Turnhout: Brepols. Irigaray, Luce. 1993. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1993. Sexes and Genealogies. New York: Columbia University Press. Irigaray, Luce. 1985. Speculum of the Other Woman. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mother Juliana an Anchorite of Norwich. 1373. XVI. REVELATIONS Of Divine Love. Catalogue of the Stowe Manuscripts in the British Museum, 2 vols. London: Longmans, 1895; Oxford, 1625. Knafo, Danielle. 2009. In Her Own Image: Women’s Self Representation in Twentieth Century Art. Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Larlham, Daniel. 2012. “The Meaning in Mimesis: Philosophy, Aesthetics, Acting Theory.” PhD diss. Columbia University. Murray, Phip. 2010. “Torture the Women.” Photofile 88: 30-37. Plato. 2014. Republic, edited and translated by Christopher EmlynJones and William Preddy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robinson, Hilary. 2006. Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women. London; New York: I.B Tauris.

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Cancer as Model, Metaphor and Process

In the Generation of a Work for Theatre Derived from William Shakespeare’s Hamlet Diane Stubbings Theatre, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate Introduction

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n enquiry into the ways in which science has been, and might be, used theatrically was initiated with the aim of answering the question—borrowed from the pre-Raphaelites (Holmes 2018, 15—‘What might a theatrical language of science look like?’ Subsequent research focussed on the biological sciences, the aim being to write a play in which genetics would act as both a thematic and structural principle. Following on from David Roesner’s (2016) categorisation of the ways in which musicality interacted with theatrical form—as metaphor, model and method—the research sought to articulate parallel modes by which ‘science-ness’ might permeate the writing and development of works for theatre. Further, it was proposed that a ‘biological dramaturgy’ might be identified. It was within this specific practice-based research environment that Blood & Shadow had its genesis. While it is not the genetics play originally envisaged, the questions underpinning the initial conception of the play were deemed worthy of further investigation. Specifically— what might happen if you gave a play cancer? If you took an extant play from the canon, one with which audiences are familiar, and introduced into that play a series of mutations that would mimic the way in which cancer operates? If you allowed the play to be overwhelmed by cancer, its immortal cells, and its ‘[pathological obsession] with replicating itself’ (Mukherjee 2016, 9)? After a brief period of initial testing, it was decided that the play to be contaminated with cancer would be William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as it satisfied the identified criteria of audience familiarity and ‘know-ability’. While Blood & Shadow is not a play about cancer, it is a play that has been modelled on cancer. Its structure is guided by the biology of the disease—the way cancer originates and spreads through the body, eventually inundating the life of the host organism—and its imagery is derived from the language by which those researching cancer biology explain and categorise its functioning. Materials

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Hamlet (Norton and Oxford editions); Cancer Research UK website; headlines characterising Trump presidency as a ‘cancer’; Robin Hesketh online lectures; The Emperor of All Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee (book and DVD); random number generator; VCA Graduate Student Office; videos showing embryogenesis; twitter;

Alleluhah! Alan Bennett (NT Live); random audience chatter and phone noise during The Lady in the Van (MTC); swimming; Escher exhibition (NGV); The Supervet; The Demon in the Machine, Paul Davies; New York Times article identifying the old embryological ‘memories’ that drive cancer; STC, Belvoir & RSC productions of Hamlet; writing Flesh Disease; staring out tram windows; morning coffee with friend from Sydney; writings of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, e.e. cummings, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Jeanette Winterson; memories of father; dissipation; lost juvenilia (Horatio’s oration over Hamlet’s grave); husband’s occupation (research pertaining to cancer); walking; Alexander Calder exhibition (NGV); life of Lucia Joyce; myopia; editorial excisions from sundry versions of Hamlet; images taken at a cellular level of mildew attacking trees (New Scientist); podcasts on Hamlet (Approaching Shakespeare; In Our Time); BBC Radio 3; WNYC, New Sounds; essays on Hamlet included in Norton and Oxford editions; reverie; typing; Meander, Spiral, Explode, Jane Allison; Game of Thrones; dog lost to cancer; Encyclopaedia Brittanica entry on cancer; collected screen saver images; energy; Escaped Alone, Caryl Churchill (Red Stitch); climate change; Greta Thunberg; Brexit; Hamlet: A Critical Reader, Ann Thompson & Neil Taylor, eds; knitting; All My Sons, Arthur Miller (NT Live); The Nursery Rhymes of England, collected by James Orchard Halliwell, 1886; … Method The writing of Blood & Shadow was guided by the biology of cancer, specifically: the rampant growth of cancer cells; the cancer cell’s ability to detach and spread; the manifestation of tumours; and, the chemical signalling employed by cancer cells in order to further their proliferation (Cancer Research UK, 2014). The first step in the process was the transcription of Shakespeare’s original play. The purpose here was to mimic the process by which DNA is replicated and potentially cancerous errors or mutations thereby introduced into the genome. Such errors arose through inadvertent typing inaccuracies (point mutations), adjustments to the rhythm of the language as it was filtered through the transcriber’s inner voice (deletions), and the inclusion of lines of dialogue taken from the work of other writers and/or the transcriber’s own imagination (insertions). Over the course of three drafts (two incomplete), these ongoing mutations occasioned tumour formation and eventual metastasis, such that, it is contended here, Blood & Shadow might be

characterised as a cancer-ridden manifestation of Hamlet.

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Results

Diane Stubbings is a writer and reviewer. Her two recent collaborations, Flesh Disease (with Romi Kupfer) and Solas (with Lynda Fleming) will have full productions at La Mama Theatre in 2020. Solas, about James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, had its premiere in 2018 as part of the VCA Directors’ Showcase season and was also selected for the UNESCO Cities of Literature Play Festival in New Zealand in September 2019. Other plays include: The Parricide (La Mama), Entangled (New Plot/107 Projects), Darkwater (staged reading, VCA) and These are the Things (staged reading, Parnassus Den @ Griffin Theatre). Diane is the recipient of an RE Ross Trust Development Award, a Grace Marion Wilson Fellowship, and an Australian Postgraduate Award. Her work has been five times shortlisted for the Rodney Seaborn

An excerpt from the resulting play, Blood & Shadow: work in progress, is appended below. The excerpt is taken from the beginning of the second act of Blood & Shadow and corresponds to the following scenes of Shakespeare’s original: III.ii.53 – IV.ii.4. Discussion Over a period of approximately nineteen weeks, the play Blood & Shadow progressed from the simple premise, ‘what might happen if you gave a play cancer?’, to a complete third draft. A preliminary analysis of the work indicates that cancer has permeated the

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The purpose here was to mimic the process by which DNA is replicated and potentially cancerous errors or mutations thereby introduced into the genome.

work in three fundamental ways: metaphor, model and process. Furthermore, analysis of the genesis of the resulting work, particularly over the first three weeks of its development, suggests functional parallels between scientific theories regarding the origins of life and the origins of a creative work. Specifically, the advent of a system wherein spontaneous structures and thereby “life” may emerge is a necessary phase in the development of a complex creative work, and that this system requires an uncommon aggregation of diverse experiences, as well as optimal exploitation of both information and energy. These preliminary findings suggest two directions for ongoing research. Firstly, analysis of the principal period of writing (that is, the four months over which the proto-play developed its final form) in order to explore possible parallels between this stage of creative development and morphogenesis. Secondly, further experimentation in the utilisation of significant biological processes (for example, evolution) in the generation of writing for performance. It should also be acknowledged here that questions regarding the relationship between the use of biological models of creative development and prevailing dramaturgical conventions and instincts warrants additional consideration.

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Playwrights’ Award, three times longlisted for the Queensland Premier’s Drama Award, and twice shortlisted for the Griffin Award. She has also been shortlisted for the Internationalists’ Global Playwriting Competition, and twice longlisted for the Theatre 503 (UK) Playwriting Award. — Bibliography Cancer Research UK. 2014. “Cancer Cells.” October 28. https://www. cancerresearchuk.org/about-cancer/what-is-cancer/how-cancerstarts/cancer-cells. Accessed March 6, 2019. Holmes, John. 2018. The Pre-Raphaelites and Science. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Mukherjee, Siddhartha. 2016. The Gene: An Intimate History. London: Vintage. Roesner, David. 2016. Musicality in Theatre: Music as Model, Method and Metaphor in Theatre-Making. London: Routledge.

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Diane Stubbings / Theatre

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Diane Stubbings / Theatre

Blood and Shadow

A Work in Progress TWO1

HOR

Darkness.

Another moment.

A light comes on.

Stacks of books on the floor, teetering like gravestones.

HOR

[VOICES comes from outside the scene.]

Moments.

VOICE

Your turn next.

A sixth light comes on with a fizz and crackle.

HOR

Here, sweet lord, at your service.

The light holds.

It is a single light globe, hanging low from the ceiling. HORATIO alone in a room. There are few windows. A single door.

Do not forget me here.

Do not forget I am here do not forget me here by your side and then he said you are welcome and then he said sir I cannot and then he said he said therefore no more but to the matter – the matter – and then he – then he – he takes up the instrument will you play upon my pipe my lord, I cannot – will you play upon this pipe my lord I cannot – it is – it is – as easy as lying …

A second light comes on.

Moments.

VOICE

Not counting myself.

HORATIO picks up a mirror, holds it to his face a moment.

HOR

Here, sweet lord—

We see reflected on the walls of the room what he sees in the mirror—the face of an old man.

A third light comes on. VOICE

Flowers there, every Sunday.

HOR

Very well my lord I did very well note.

A fourth light comes on. HOR

Ham. Hamel. Hamlet. Let me speak.

VOICE

That funny-looking man always at the one next door.

A fifth light comes on. VOICE

Never go again now. Not that there’s anyone there missing me. I stopped believing long ago.

HOR

Do not forget me here.

A moment.

Moments. VOICE

South on Millgate to Castle Walk.

HORATIO slowly lowers the mirror. The image holds a moment longer. VOICE

Riverside road to Bridge street. Slee Gill Way then Thurkston Lane.

HOR

Why look you how unworthy a thing you make of me. To set this task by one who has within him no poetry—whose mind is full of restless spirits that will not be quelled— who has, alas, sufficient sight to recognise how words he plunders bright shining from his mouth are doomed to hang, muddy and grey, ‘gainst the incandescence of your life. Why look you / how unworthy a thing …

HAM

Why look you how unworthy a thing you make of me. You would play upon me, you would seem to know my stops, you would pluck out the heart of my mystery. You

In act two, entrances and exits are not marked, so it is up to each production to decide whether they want all the actors on stage all the time through this section, or whether they want to move people on and off. Ideally, in whatever staging is used, there should be a sense of the ‘characters’ of Hamlet being ever-present, moving in and out of shadow/memory. 1

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Diane Stubbings / Theatre

would sound me from my lowest note to my compass. ‘Sblood – do you think I am easier to be played on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you fret me you cannot play upon me.

A moment. HOR

Tis now the very witching hour of the night.

A moment. HOR

Tis now the very witching / hour of the night

HAM

The very witching hour of the night, when churchyards yawn and hell itself breaks out contagion to this world.

A seventh light comes on. HOR

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Carnal – bloody – unnatural. Slaughters. Death. Purpose mistook. Judgement accidental. So shall you hear. So shall you hear.

HAM

Mother, you have my father much offended.

HOR

Answer for the silence pressed into my tongue like a sacrament. Weak pipe and little drum, laggards and failures. They are beating at the doors!

GERT

What wilt thou do? Thou dost not mean to—? Hamlet, / no.

HOR

No. No. Here the ease, the derangement that might be set willingly to right – there, there, the turmoil. Murder, ho! Fortitude collapses and the wheel turns forever still. Murder and annihilation beyond! Where is the watch? Who will hear me?

HAMLET lunges at POLONIUS. POL [As he is killed] Shuttered—tenantless—unweeded garden. GERT

What hast thou done?

Moments.

HAM Nothing.

CLAUD Arm you, I pray, to this speedy voyage, or we will fetters put about his fear which now goes too free-footed.

GERT Nothing?

ROS

We will haste us.

HAM As vacant a gesture as kill a king and marry with his brother.

POL

My lord, he is going to his mother’s closet.

GERT

Kill a king?

CLAUD Go, I will follow straight.

HAM

Aye, lady, kill a king, those were my words.

HAM

Now might I do it. And so I am revenged. What business of mine where he goes as long as he lives not here? Let it be done. White sheets a bed slippery with lust. My father. Cut the flay the stain – the ulcer black the stench the— Let. It. Be. Done. Cut the blot, what then? The filth has spread itself already. Drag out his heart, sever his flesh all the way to the bone and what purpose is served? When the disease has eaten its way into the very quintessence of—What is then left? Into whose soul will the pestilence next leech? Dark in mien and movement, flashing in his mocking mirror the obscure soul of the world, and darkness shining in brightness which brightness could not comprehend. When he is drunk, then I’ll do it. When he is in his rage, or in the incestuous pleasure of his bed – then I’ll do it.

Moments.

POL

I’ll silence me here. Pray you, be sharp with him.

GERT

Fear me not. I hear him coming.

HAM

Now, mother. What’s the matter?

GERT

Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.

HOR

Answer for the lies.

HOR

Is it now? Or now? Be no more silent. Speak. Yet who is there to hear? There is in my sight, in the folding unfolding clenching unclenching of my mind, an image that I dare not name, that I dare not trace, that flutters and shimmers, one moment there, solid, the next moment gone – that sits in my memory like the outward gasp of a wave on sand, and it will not be caught up again. A glance through the doorway of a room, and her strad dling him, inducing him to stay, stare down the hate – and coming to me later, him sleeping at last, and promising me, promising me – as long as I – as long as I— Leg draped over mine, my body his absence, my make-be lieve sleep the draught inspiring her own, a final cup of wine on her way to oblivion. Be good for me. Be good for me. If you want him never to leave again, be good for me. Imagining reaches its end. Turning and crackling. Pick up the strain. Set it back in its place. Begin again. While lies sit like stars, rolling, constellated, hunched and blaz ing, great bonfires eating night, consuming entire this brave and overhanging firmament.

Moments. HAM

Peace, woman. Let me sit you down and wring your heart. The deed thou hast in silence acquiesced …

Diane Stubbings / Theatre

Look you here. The counterfeit presentiment of two brothers. This was your husband. Look you what follows —this now your husband, a thing that mildews the trunk of his sturdy brother, gnawing at his realm, his virtue, his wife, consuming all my own want – until there is nothing of the better left and all remaining a dank and eager canker. You have stolen again my father from me. By lying with him, you have stolen again my father, forced / him HOR

My father. My son.

HAM [cont.] GERT

to walk unshriven through the back alleys and shadows of this kingdom, until there is not a corner of this place, not a cell, that is not haunted by his anguish.

Speak no more.

HOR Unnamed unalways not-forever there-not-there the never-happened. GERT

Thou has turned my eyes into my very soul and there I see such black and grieved spots … No more, sweet Hamlet.

A play of light-shadows. The lights dim, but aren’t extinguished. A funnel of light rises in the room, circling on itself like a whirlwind that turns in slow motion.

GERT

There is nothing there.

HOR

There is all of life.

GERT

All that is, I see – and I see nothing.

HOR Nothing staid, nothing settled, all of quickness rippling dancing. GERT

This is the very coinage of your brain.

HOR

Do not forget.

GERT

Thou hast cleft my heart in twain.

HOR

Do not forget – you are Hamlet, father of the Dane – I name you thus that I may not name you else.

Slowly, the light falters. Dies. Moments. HAM

Go not to my uncle’s bed. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. Refrain tonight and that shall lend a kind of easiness to the next abstinence, the next more easy, for use can almost change the stamp of nature and either shame the devil or throw him out. [looking to POLONIUS] Heaven hath pleased it so to punish me with this, and this with me. I will bestow him and will answer well the death I gave him.

HOR

Unnamed unalways. There not there. See, my lord. There. Your father.

HAMLET ‘drags the body from the room’.

HAM

Save me and hover o’er me.

The light swirls. Rises again.

A moment.

HOR Silence.

Moments.

HAM

Just HORATIO watching it.

Heavenly Gods, what would you?

HOR Silence. HAM

Is it come you are to chide your tardy son that, lapsed in time and passion, let’s go by the vital acting of your dread command?

HOR

If you want him never to leave again … Do not forget. Tell about the places you have been – strange customs. Sigh of leaves and waves, waiting, awaiting, the fullness of their times. I come to whet they almost blunted purpose.

HAM

I am the murdered father: your mother is the guilty queen: you are the dispossessed son.

GERT

Alas, he’s mad. Whereon do you look?

HAM

See you how pale he glares? [to the light] Do not look upon me.

HOR

Not big enough not then—not big enough to hold the edges—had it been as large as all of Denmark—encom passed every field and every—had it been as large—the sea beyond, the sea beyond pushing all—the time it’s—sea-bird opens her wings, batters the shore with— there is impossibility in all beyond and all beyond is —every page covered from compass point to compass point and—writing the borders of the kingdom and feeling the wash the sting the stinging hail, and cutting dragging, the sky the slew of cold and it beating at me, it beating at the borders, ghost walk beating at the edge —the edge of knowing—demanding to be known—[as the light encompasses the entire room] and nutshells catch infinity.

VOICE

What have you done, my lord, with the body?

A moment. VOICE

What, my lord, have you done with the body?

The ghost-light dies. Just the light globes, burning brightly.

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The Fourth Persona: Archaeology of Costume An Experimental Exhibition

Emily Collett Production, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate

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he following visual essay is a reflection of an experimental exhibition held in the Victorian College of the Arts, School of Production, Costume Workroom in July 2019. The exhibition was designed to test ideas and generate discussion relating to the author’s PhD research, examining the history of costume for dance in Australia and how it intersects with notions of national identity. The exhibition contained fifteen photographs of historically significant dance costumes from archives across Australia and England, printed at large scale on matte paper. The images show the costumes as they were first seen in their archival setting, and were displayed to replicate these initial encounters. Those costumes which were laid flat on tables in the archive were represented by a photograph laid flat on a costume worktable, and those costumes hanging on racks were displayed by photographs hanging from costume racks which were set closely together to replicate the original spatial settings. The images of costumes which were not allowed to be handled in the archive were displayed under a layer of tissue paper, with a sign requesting exhibition visitors wear white cotton gloves before viewing the photograph. An accompanying soundtrack played on the periphery of the exhibition space, which played a looped recording of the constantly cracking, creaking, metal roof which exists above some of the costumes represented in the exhibition. Each costume, or set of costumes, embodies a significant story related to Australia’s developing sense of identity, but the histories were kept separate from the images and were only accessible via QR Code links to an accompanying website, or by conversing directly with the author in the exhibition space. Each photograph was simply accompanied by a list of basic factual information such as the costume designer, costume maker if known, the production the costume was worn in and the company who produced it, the year it was premiered, the archived costume location, the costume’s character name and who it was worn by, and a brief costume description. This information sheet was pinned to the chest of an otherwise bare dressmaker’s dummy standing beside each photograph. The exhibition worked as a testing ground in the style of a scientific laboratory, rather than presenting a specific intention or conclusion. Following the idea that costume acts as a cultural marker, the focus was on how archived costume can indicate notions of national identity. The word ‘archaeology’ was included in the title to propose that archived costume can act in the same way as other objects used in traditional archaeological studies, to better understand a collective of humans through material culture analysis. The exhibition also states that when a performance costume ceases to be used as a tool for performance and enters an archive, it acquires a 'fourth persona'. On top of the private, public and professional identities a single costume represents of the individual/s who wore it, an archived costume then also represents a collective identity—that of the society from within which the costume was

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created. The costume tells multiple stories of people, time and place, and as such, is a valuable research tool to better understand the nuanced identity of a collective of humans. The exhibition’s primary questions were: •

Can a collection of archived costumes, then, inform notions of a greater collective, or 'national', identity?

•

H ​ ow can archived costume be exhibited in a way which allows communication of these multiple histories, and enable an audience to gain a sense of something greater than just the individual who wore it?

A further intention was inspired by Susan A. Crane’s Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum (2004), which interrogates the trustworthiness of the museum as a memory institution and questions: if museum practices mess with tradition, is institutionalised memory fundamentally at risk? Of particular interest was Crane’s suggestion that: Art which comments on historical consciousness is never merely creative and fictional: such art deliberately references a body of knowledge and experience shared by historically conscious viewers. Never quite completely separate from historical scholarship despite its lack of scholarly apparatus, historically conscious art is in fact competent for a performance of history in the museum, thus further complicating the interactions between the personal and the public, the historical and the historically conscious, the excess of memory and the experience of the museum. (2004, 324) The idea that the exhibition could become a form of ‘historically conscious art’ and, through the interactive relationship between the visitor and the costume photograph become a ‘performance of history’, led to an added, and final, layer of participation by the visitors. Before each visitor departed the exhibition space, they were asked to answer one yes-or-no question, which was inside a tin at the exhibition entrance. Each person was given a button, and asked to answer yes or no to the question by placing their button in the appropriate jar. The question was ‘up until this point, did you believe the factual evidence given about each costume to be true?’ By asking this at the end of their journey, the intention was to raise questions of memory and truth, specifically in relation to archival practices. Who is archiving these costumes, and how are they—and the memories they hold—being framed by the people responsible for them? Whose ‘truth’ do these historical artefacts tell, and how can a performance of history, such as this exhibition, highlight inherent

problems of contemporary archival and museum practices? All of the factual information given about each costume was, in fact, correct, but the question provoked discussion about what we, in contemporary society, choose to believe (and who we inherently trust) not only in regards to our history and identity, but also in our everyday lives. The quantity of yes or no responses was not specifically of interest (although the yes jar received the majority of votes), rather, it was the resulting discussion about the truth of our history, and the juxtaposition and display methods of the costume photographs. By setting the exhibition in a costume workroom, rather than a traditional gallery space, and showing the costumes as objects encountered in archival settings rather than on mannequins, or in production photographs, the relationship between the costumes and the exhibition visitors enabled a different understanding of the costume’s purpose than traditional costume exhibitions promote. The fact that the costumes were seen through the added, literal, lens of the author’s camera, further complicated the layering of contextual framing through which each visitor encountered the costumes. The spatial arrangement of the exhibits and request for visitors to wear white cotton gloves highlighted the practical experience of costume as an artefact, as well as its historical value and deeper meaning. The photographic quality of the images was compromised by enlarging them to such a large format, however, this enhanced the costumes’ sense of age and historical weight by adding a subtle patina to their surface. The placement and ordering of photographs across the work tables and costume racks brought together unexpected comparisons, and highlighted challenges in the costumes’ archival framings, particularly in relation to their socio-political contexts. As a result, silent voices belonging to each costume were made visible, and suggest an area of research in which the archived costume can significantly contribute. Although their focus is on archives of two-dimensional, textual records, and documentation, David Thomas et al describe how ‘it has become more accepted that archival silences are a proper subject for enquiry and to view the absence of records as positive statements, rather than passive gaps’, (2017, xx), which could successfully be applied to archives of three dimensional objects. Valerie Johnson compares those silences to a ghostly voice, or emptiness in an archive, which, when examined, proves to be charged with the energy of what is missing (2017a, 105). Speaking of white settler societies in particular, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill sees that new approaches to communication and learning in art museums, and archives, gives communities the opportunity to re-remember their histories, where ‘[f]ormerly silent voices are being heard, and new cultural identities are being forged from the remains of the past’ (2000, 563). Johnson relates this even more closely to the artefacts

themselves, whereby studying existing bias and resulting silences in an archive is ‘allowing records to speak with new voices’ (2017b, 149). Thomas et al, Johnson, and Hooper-Greenhill show how silent archival voices speak as loudly as what is there. The Fourth Persona experimental costume exhibition demonstrated that the silent voices of archived costume, when studied through a material culture lens, can communicate a nuanced understanding of the social context at the time of their creation and use. These findings will now inform further study into how the archived costumes can speak with new voices and allow communities to re-remember their own histories. — Emily Collett is a set and costume designer whose practice comprises theatre, dance, film, television and costume research. Emily was nominated for a Green Room Award for Dream Home (Northcote Town Hall, 2015) and has received creative research grants from the Ian Potter Cultural Trust and ArtStart. Recent design credits include Control (Red Stitch Actor’s Theatre 2019), Wild Cherries (La Mama Courthouse 2019), and Whale (Northcote Town Hall and Monash PAC 2019). She was the set and costume candidate in Melbourne Theatre Company’s Women In Theatre program in 2016, and the Malthouse Theatre’s Besen Family Artist Program’s design participant in 2017. A PhD candidate and tutor in Design at the Victorian College of the Arts, her research focuses on the topic of costume for performance as a cultural marker, specifically in relation to Australian identity. — Bibliography Crane, Susan A. 2004. "Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum." In Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, edited by Bettina Messias Carbonell. Oxford: Blackwell. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. 2000. "Changing Values in the Art Museum: Rethinking Communication and Learning." In Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, edited by Bettina Messias Carbonell. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Johnson, Valerie. 2017a. "Dealing with the Silence." In The Silence in the Archive, edited by David Thomas, Simon Fowler and Valerie Johnson. London: Facet Publishing. Johnson, Valerie. 2017b. "Solutions to the Silence." In The Silence of the Archive, edited by David Thomas, Simon Fowler and Valerie Johnson. London: Facet Publishing. Thomas, David, Simon Fowler, and Valerie Johnson. 2017. The Silence of the Archive. London: Facet Publishing.

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Emily Collett / Production

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Emily Collett / Production

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The Safety Spectre Mark Friedlander Visual Arts, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

D

uring the second year of my undergraduate studies I hung a sheet of acrylic in the middle of the foyer of my art school. When encountered from the side, its shallow depth made it disappear into the background. Over the course of the show a member of staff walked into the piece and cut their forehead. The institution justifiably responded by removing the work, but the action piqued an awareness of the role safety plays in our practice as artists. We understandably stop the viewer from suffering for our art, but how does safety shape the way we fabricate and present the objects we make? Does the form bear an aesthetic trace that is visible but not called out for what it is? How does this spectre effect my own agency as an artist? Is risk a material like any other that, with time and practice, I can manage? Framing these concerns was a body of work produced for a recent solo exhibition. Containment presented three new works: a video, a lithograph on a steel support structure and a heat lamp. Glowing from the light of a bank of bar heaters, a series of wax panels are captured in the video work until they have substantially melted. As time elapses it becomes apparent that the objects are maquettes, that the room is a workshop and that there is a person walking around fiddling with stuff and making adjustments. Initially intended as a performative piece for the gallery, the wax was to be melted in the art space. A reluctance to expose the viewer to risk arose before this occurred. In this uncontrolled environment, vapour would have built up producing a volatile flammable hazard exposing people to toxic gas. Conducting the filming in a workshop with extraction, fire-fighting equipment and concrete and steel surfaces limited the potential effects. Substantially different in form, the workshop video bore little resemblance to its gallery counterpart. Gone was the tension in the space, the smell of the material, its critical time factors. Had it occurred in-situ, there would have been a relic, a residue of the event. Standing in its place was a flat screen with a scene that took its framing from the lithograph. Simply, safety had diminished the outcome.

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But did these obstacles afford my work or practice any benefits? Video is not a medium I have used, so the opportunity to do so extended my practice in a new direction. Framing a fixed space over time creates an unexpected openness, as trams trundle past

in the background and sounds from unexplained sources speak to a drama that is unfolding beyond the lens. Having taken weeks to fabricate, the demise of the structure had to proceed, and the immediacy of the record created new tensions that I had not foreseen. Exhibited along with the video, a lithograph based on a still photograph of a confined architectural space, was constructed of the same wax panels. This was held with magnets on a steel frame that came directly off the wall. The translucency of the paper made the image appear illuminated. The angular corners of the frame were intended, their hard line following the edge of the paper. In retrospect the corners were not the safest option. At the time of this support structure being fabricated, the aesthetic obscured the thinking. Despite years of focussing on risk, the look of a work can dominate the process, eclipsing other considerations. Plans are currently in place to put this work in another show and I want to justify why it won’t be modified. A lack of clear framing is the element that made my undergraduate work hazardous. In this work, however, the piece is approached from the front in a passage, it is contrasted against a white wall and it’s in a gallery where there is an assumed expectation that artworks are not to be touched. Rounded or foam corners would be appropriate if the work was to be physically encountered. Setting the parameters so that the potential harm for viewers is very small constitutes an acceptable risk. Management of the problem allows for this work to retain its integrity, and for myself as the artist to have sufficient agency in the face of my obligation to others. Accompanying the lithograph, a heat lamp hung from a steel arm. A bulb’s warmth on a winter’s evening is a valuable commodity and for anybody under 203cm in shoes, this was the place to stand. Falling under a similar rational to the frame, this was an acceptable risk. The baton fittings and wiring were the biggest issue in this element of the show, as a surface burn has less impact than electrocution. Surprisingly, the ceramic fitting that is appropriate for this context is a far more attractive object than the plastic vulnerable version. Here, the aesthetic affect was preferable to the unmediated object. A non-exhaustive list of safety resources includes the Occupational Health and Safety Act 2004, which considers the wellbeing of

workers in Victoria. Standards Australia publish documents that allow us to manage services, systems and products reliably, consistently and safely. Known as Australian Standards, they range from managing noise to constructing steel structures. Safety Data Sheets are produced by organisations that sell, import and manufacture hazardous chemicals. They give useful information about storage, transportation, and management, Standard Operating Procedures and Risk Assessments are written for the use of machinery and equipment, allowing us to consider where risks occur, the effect they may have and how to prevent and resolve them. Institutions have differing expectations for the management of risk, although it is the temperament of the artist that largely dictates how the exposure to hazards are dealt with. Having colleagues with permanent injuries from poor lifting technique and sensitivities to chemicals has made me risk averse. For the preparation of this space, numerous resources helped make a task as simple as

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not necessarily desirable. Litigation is rare and yet the pressures on institutions increase with the awareness of legal responsibility. In this climate, a dialogue around how to remain active agents in this space will need to grow. My first exhibition piece was hung on a wall in the local library; light of weight, manageable, non-toxic, ideal. Subsequent to this was the work that opened this article: heavy, large, hanging from a flimsy ceiling and sharp. In a word, a risk. As artists, we make prototypes. I acknowledge this as part of my practice, and I have obligations to myself and others when creating work in this manner. Materials take time to understand and the risk they pose is simply another element of this knowledge. Discovering if a glue will hold two surfaces together is something that can happen at the same time as you research how to handle it safely. In this sense, risk is a property of the material.

Despite years of focussing on risk, the look of a work can dominate the process, eclipsing other considerations.

painting the gallery wall safe. These include Safety Data Sheets to deal with hazards of the paint, being taught manual handling by an ergonomist, and accessing Safe Work Australia’s Code of Practice entitled ‘Managing the Risk of Falls at Workplaces’ to develop a Standard Operating Procedure for ladder use. Accessing these documents can be expensive and many artists are unaware of their existence, making it unrealistic to assume these elementary risks are dealt with consistently. Planned artworks can still encounter a situation where safety concerns prevent them from being realised. For an artist wanting to access height during a performance, being directed to use a ladder under two metres can impose an aesthetic layer that challenges the intention of the work. Without sufficient money a work that requires engineering support for public display is not going to be made to an appropriate standard, or will simply not be completed. Walls that follow the Australian Standard AS1684 for residential timber-framed construction follow a built logic that is practical but

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Ideally I try to manage the risk as a work progresses and there have been works that have been too compromised by the time they are acceptable to make or show. Solutions have also extended individual works, and my practice, towards pleasing outcomes. Friends and colleagues give great advice, and failing that, professional help is often available from retail outlets and the internet. Managing risk is a constraint, and fortunately for me, it speaks to the bounding of space that is a feature of my practice. — Mark Friedlander is a Melbourne artist with an interest in materials and the complexity of art process. He has a Bachelor of Fine Art (Hons) (UK), a Graduate Diploma of Education (Art and Art History) and a Master of Fine Arts (Visual Art) (Victorian College of the Arts). Mark is currently a PhD student in the Faculty of Fine Art and Music at the University of Melbourne.

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Mark Friedlander / Visual Arts

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Mark Friedlander / Visual Arts

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A Naïve Faith in Images (Re)Construction of Two Files

Emanuel Rodríguez-Chaves Visual Arts, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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he current paper is a modified, and simplified version of the problematics touched on in my PhD exegesis and aims to question the role of art in our current informational era. The title of this research project is: A Naive Faith in Images: (Re) Construction of Two Files. I use the prefix ‘re’ in parenthesis before the term construction in order to contain the process of both case studies that serve as a structure for this research. One of the cases being real (a re-construction), where I have undertaken field trips to collect original documents from various archives, and a second case which is entirely fictional (a construction), where I have assembled various documents and images. Research summary A predicament exists between reality and fiction that makes up the political imaginary. Two South American situations from recent history have been interrogated: The Assassination of Viviana Gallardo (Costa Rica, 1981) and The File of 2132-97 Svetoslav S. This creative PhD addresses art’s ability to articulate political imaginaries and questions the temporalities, localities and identities caught up in these narratives. The initial set of questions I posed to myself were: Is it possible to manipulate the meaning of artistic images through the internal processes of painting (the archive, the collage, the montage, distortion and the gesture)? How are these processes affected by new technologies of manipulation and the ways images are communicated (virtual platforms, Photoshop, etc.)? Is it possible for painting and art, in general, to affect the construction of political narratives and imaginaries? How can painting enter into a dialogue with images of political violence and suffering? Can art represent the so-called ‘unrepresentable’ (death, absence)? By distilling this grouping of questions, I was able to narrow the direction of my research into the following enunciation/research question: How can contemporary painting establish/negotiate relationships between philosophical aspects around the manipulation of images and socio-political imaginaries1 to construct new narratives? Methodology From the (re) construction of the life of these two characters, one real (Gallardo) and one imaginary (Svetoslav S.) my project proposes to demonstrate the multiple variations that constitute the construction of history and the particular narratives of their contexts. Throughout this research I have been creating a series of archives through the collection of documents (photos, files,

A definition is needed: outline I would like to start this text by outlining, or in other words, by setting up a platform and context for this research. Which is to say, I will whimsically address the research as a set of questions that I pose to myself. Here I paraphrase Gilles Deleuze’s introduction in a famous video of his conference on cinema, where he addresses the vulnerabilities of philosophy to try to reflect on cinema, and cinema on philosophy. He sets the terrain as one of vulnerability, anxiety and uncertainty. And he goes on to say that in order ‘to have an idea, there must be a necessity, and a necessity is a very complex thing.’ (Deleuze, 1989) Since I started this project, I had an idea that was motivated by a necessity. The idea in general terms was driven by the millions of images, not only from today’s data stream but especially by images of the past—how these images, millions of them, have formed or served to articulate history. Within this idea there is a crucial question about the use of images, and I wanted to articulate possible arguments to reflect upon, through the problematisation of the mechanisms of painting. By using these two cases as the core, I wanted to evidence the fundamental values and correspondences they share as well as their points of disagreement. In this way, the concept of the mise en abyme2 served as platform to facilitate a scheme of questions that arise from my practical work and further theoretical discussion. A mise en abyme or mise-en-abîme, from the French, can be understood as a double mirroring effect created by placing an image within an image, repeating infinitely; or as a reflexive strategy where the content of a medium is the medium itself. Just like the endless repetition that is created when we stand in the middle of two mirrors. This concept helps to illustrate the intricacies of the practical work produced during this research by emphasising its reflective (mirror) quality, which returns the gaze in a multiplicity of subjects. To target these aspects, I systematise a set of concerns around the differences and particularities of the types of images I use in the practical work. I unravel the differences between the concepts of the archive and the atlas and their use by contemporary artists as structure, process and in some of the cases, as practical outcome; furthermore, I elaborate on a final predicament about

I refer here to the notion of collective or social imaginaries. That is, the set of values, systems and symbols common to a particular social group. The definitions of mise en abime from the Oxford dictionary are (1) The double-mirroring effect created by placing an image within an image and so on, repeating infinitely (infinite regression): for example, the album cover of Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma (1969). This is also known as Droste effect (2). A reflexive strategy where the content of a medium is the medium itself: for example, Shakespeare’s Hamlet features a play within a play and Fellini’s 8½ (1963) is a film within a film. See also reflexivity (3). A formal technique in Western art of placing a small copy of an image inside a larger one, see: Diccionary, O. (2019). 1 2

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newspaper clippings, videos and audio files). These, in turn, have served as the basis for the production of new paintings and objects (such as sculptures and videos). Additionally, these art objects are used as ‘accessories’ within spaces or installations—montages that aim to motivate multiple readings and create associations between historical concepts or facts, be they real or fictitious, without suggesting a single tempo-historical line.

the role of contemporary painting and its mechanisms of production (collection of images, montage, collage, digital and analogue manipulation of imagery). The image: a scrambled definition In my first chapter I have tried to understand the types of images I am interested in for the purpose of this research; that is, images that have double or multiple meanings. In particular, images that due to their compositional and formal aspects (aesthetic values), because of their context (the spaces or geographies these images are placed or produced); or due to similarities with other images (in particular images that are used in the media or in cultural products), can be perceived or experienced (through their agency, that is, through their effect on the viewers experience) as images that can be read in multiple ways. One might think that because of the overall use of images in contemporary society, their value and meaning would be simple to define. What is often done instead is to identify the intentions of the so-called producer of the images in question. For example: a political party producing ideological propaganda, a church displaying its icons and using them to indoctrinate devotees; or alternatively, when they are used as marketing tools—count-

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Why is it important to question the role that images play today in our worlds? To answer this question, at least superficially, we can do a memory exercise around the recent historical processes that have affected the world and how different ideologies and cultures have shaped globalised concepts of contemporaneity, usually leaving aside marginal imaginaries or peripheral narratives of the so-called Global South. While one side of the world is advancing into progressive policies regarding identity politics, tokenistic moves towards a much-needed diversity and tolerance; the other side of the world thrives in wars, massacres and socioeconomic looting. An eternal double image of globalisation and progress on one side, and death and destruction on the other. This can be read as a lament but in reality, it tells us a lot about how we understand the duality images, and how the contemporary universal notions of the Other and Otherness affect us as individuals and societies. Meta-image Meta-images or Metapictures as defined by Mitchell are ‘pictures that refer to themselves or to other pictures, pictures that are used to show what a picture is.’ (1994, 35) Therefore, is it possible to define or deconstruct the meaning of an image without its ideologi-

Why is it important to question the role that images play today in our worlds?

er-culture images—filtered and utilised to sell clothes and beauty products. Another closer to home example is of artists who, following a particular agenda, embed their work with their own ideology. The German theorist, Hans Belting touches on this when he says ‘[images] should neither be separated from nor confounded with their medial technologies. In the former case they are reduced to mere phantoms, in the latter to mere technique.’ (2011, 11) In this initial chapter, I discussed the malleability and interpretability of images through the reading and analysis of relevant material as defined in various disciplines from philosophy, media studies, cultural studies, iconography and iconology3. The American academic, W. J. T. Mitchell describes the double condition of the image as a defining feature when considering the question of what an image is. Mitchell argues ‘[we] need to account for not just the power of images but their powerlessness, their impotence, their abjection. We need, in other words, to grasp both sides of the paradox of the image: that it is alive—but also dead; powerful—but also weak.’ (2005, 10, original emphasis)

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cal producer? I will start by elaborating on W.J.T. Mitchell’s question: What is an image? In his book Iconology, Image, Text, Ideology (1986) Mitchell defines images as ‘not just a particular kind of sign, but something like an actor on the historical stage, a presence or character endowed with legendary status.’ (9) He cautions anyone interested in the problem of defining the concept of ‘image’, to acknowledge two undeniable things: firstly, that the variety of things called by the name of image is vast (ideas, pictures, dreams, drawings, illusions, etc); and secondly, the fact that because we call numerous things under the label ‘image’, it doesn’t mean that they all must have something in common (1986, 9). The idea of the meta-image serves here as an allegory of my own process of construction and deconstruction of images through various filters. Starting from the collection of documents and the creation of archives. Followed by the making of digital and physical collages, which are then made into paintings, videos, prints or drawings. These in turn, used in larger constructions—or as Mitchell refers to meta-images: as ‘a wilderness of images’ (2005, 91). According to Mitchell, ‘an image cannot be seen as such without a

For further reading on Iconology and image interpretation: W.J.T Mitchell (2005; 1986). Iconography is the study of icons, especially with religious connotations; iconology is the interpretation of images. 3

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Emanuel Rodríguez-Chaves / Visual Arts

paradoxical trick of consciousness, an ability to see something as ‘there’ and ‘not there’ at the same time’ (1986, 17). Thus, this would imply that the paintings made in this research want to aspire to be meta-images, in the sense of being physical (an object), but not being the things they represent themselves. The paintings function as autonomous entities, creating connections between various elements of their composition. Going further; these meta-images need to be closely related to other images. They need to be (re) contextualised as/in particular spaces (which I call scenarios) to trigger new meaning—or to be invested with another meaning. Otherwise, the paintings or objects would only be two-dimensional surfaces, empty carcasses.

the combination of photographs or of their parts became the basis for the structure of a (new) picture. By common consent, the Dadaists started to call their works “photomontages”’ (Huttunen); where multiple objects, perspectives and materials were unified to create new images.

Figure 2: Digital collage, and final painting: Onslaught, oil on canvas, c.1978 (restored 2017–2018) *Signed on the back. Documentation by Aaron Christopher Rees.

Defining the double/various meaning(s) of images: montage

Figure 1: Page 155 of Judicial file: EXP.341 AÑO 1981 REM 5190 ARCH.494. The Assassination of Viviana Gallardo. This document is part of a series of photos taken by the judicial police as reconstruction of the events for the investigation. This image aims to show the visual perspective of the victim before being killed.

Montage Instead of searching for a definition of images, it is more pertinent to attempt to define the complex dynamic of associations between images: the processes within the meta-image. An image that delves into itself; that is, an image that works as a medium, and due to its vulnerable and transfixing qualities—aided by the incorporation of additional sets of images—could lead to the creation of new fictional spaces. New realities, perhaps? For that reason, the first and obvious account we can agree on is that the definition of the image we are seeking here, or the one I am aspiring to explore, is a rationale around an image of images. Images that contain a multiplicity of meanings. This can be seen in the way the practical work has been conducted using multiple pictures to assemble a nearly topographical ontology of images, a mapping of the existence and meaning of images. This interpretation also means that this definition of meta-image is in correspondence with the concept of montage; understanding montage as an assemblage of images, a juxtaposition of various figure-notions. The technique of montage has a long tradition especially in the history of cinema, coined by Sergei Eisenstein and Russian cinema theories and in vanguard movements like Dadaism or Cubism; ‘[for] the Dadaists,

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In his book The Future of the Image, theorist Jacques Rancière (2007) argues that the double meaning of images refers to its double bind: the symbolical montage and dialectical montage. The dialectical is nurtured and constructed by showing opposition. Chaotic arrangements that create confrontations in order to bring some elements to the foreground. Sometimes by exposing what is evident to the eye ‘by fragmenting continuums and distancing terms that call for each other, or, conversely, by assimilating heterogenous elements and combining incompatible things, it creates clashes.’ (2007, 56) These clashes, Rancière suggests, serve as mechanisms to measure the most vernacular aspects, he continues, ‘it involves organising a clash, presenting the strangeness of the familiar, in order to reveal a different order of measurement that is only uncovered by the violence of a conflict.’ (57, my emphasis) Conflict has been fundamental in the production of the practical work that accompanies this exegesis as it is based on the direct contraposition of contradictory or paradoxical images, particularly in the case of the construction of the fictional character. With this, I was interested in the creation of the life of a war criminal. However, I wanted to introduce the character by employing the facade of an ordinary citizen by describing common facts like photos of his pets or other mundane experiences like his romantic wanderings, or his Sundaypainter4 artworks. The symbolical montage, Rancière explains, works no different from the dialectical montage in that ‘it also relates heterogenous elements and constructs little machines through a montage of unrelated elements. But it assembles them in accordance with the opposite logic.’ (2007, 57) Though, this logic plays its disparate ‘elements in the form of Mystery.’ (60) For Rancière, ‘mystery’ is an aesthetic mechanism to create analogy, to give shape to abstractions and to make the poetic physical. I interpret Rancière’s definition in relation to how images seek to shape ideas, how these ideas are transformed into the physical realm: the objects/surfaces/performance. Be these three-dimensional or flat objects, like photography and some types of painting, such

Emanuel Rodríguez-Chaves / Visual Arts

images therefore lure our gaze because of the inexplicable power of their contradictions. This lure could be simply explained as the creation of an image-montage, its abrupt juxtaposition of elements produces a conflict; it shocks and confuses us for a moment. Following this stage of awe and collision, a continuation appears creating links and connections between narratives. These two forces, Rancière persuades, inhabit/form History. And he continues: History can indeed be two contradictory things: the discontinuous line of revealing clashes or the continuum of co-presence. The linkage of heterogenous elements constructs and, at the same time, reflects a meaning of history that is displaced between these two poles. (Rancière, 2007, 60) To target these, I have analysed the work of Guatemalan performance artist Regina José Galindo (1974) and Spanish artist Daniel García Andújar (1966). I use my analysis of both artists’ works initially to establish a common ground to insert my research and practical work in direct comparison; and secondly, to define the symbolical and dialectical values of montage. Galindo’s performance, La sangre del cerdo (2017; trans The Blood of the Pig) is a straightforward political statement against the United States of America’s immigration policies that affect Central America, as she herself defines it (i.e. symbolical approach). Whereas García Andújar’s installation The Disasters of War, Metics Akademia (2017) and The Disasters of War/Trojan Horse (2017), delve around the atlas and the archive as devices to construct and to question traditional notions of history (i.e. dialectical approach).

In this section I tried to understand how we can delineate and comprehend images in general. I started from two assumptions: one, believing that images are associated with what they represent; and two, that they are alive, and actually feel. In both hypotheses, I claim that sacredness is what makes them crucial to the beholder-believer. Therefore, what makes these images sacred? I use the example of the cross in Christian Catholic doctrine to illustrate what I want to say: the cross was the place where Christ, the son of God, was crucified to pay for our sins. Here we can relate the object to specific characteristics such as suffering, pain, blood, death, darkness, and punishment. But having a divinity crucified on the cross in order to absolve the sins of the world transfixes the supposed original meaning of the cross5; one could also say it erases the negative connotations ascribed to it. This adds specific symbolic characteristics such as divine power, fear, light, protection. What is interesting though, is that the symbol of the cross does not actually become lighter or purified. Instead, it is filled with more of what we could call ‘dark connotations’: an object to be feared and revered. In this part I have used the theories of Susie Linfield’s text The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence where she questions both conservative and postmodern image critiques around the ways in which we should see and interpret images of violence or suffering (2010, 65). Linfield’s text is useful in the analysis of the documents from the judicial file investigating Viviana Gallardo’s murder and the images the media used at the time. It also serves to problematise the ways in which I wanted to display these documents, be that through a pedagogical perspective or through more creative and experimental approaches, like the making of video art. Just as Linfield does, both Rancière (2007, 109) and Georges DidiHuberman (2008), question the more conservative perspectives—in some cases, even as covered censorship campaigns—to which some critics of the image have been inclined, when it comes to images depicting suffering or violence. These three authors, with their variations on the subject, claim that the visualisation of these images in art is necessary. Not only for a public who is unfamiliar with them but because they also demonstrate their potential as documents of resistance. These images are mostly made in extreme conditions, often risking the photographer’s own life. So, by censoring them, the power to articulate a cry for resistance is silenced as well.

Figure 3: The Disasters of War, Metics Akademia (2017). Daniel García Andújar. Mixed-media installation. Dimensions variable. EMST—National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens. Documentation: Mathias Völzke.

The sacredness of (some) images A big portion of my preoccupations since the start of this project was caused by the supposed sublimity of art and its images: sacredness. By this, I mean how we sometimes treat art images and objects as entities or events that encompass a quasi-deity aspect. Poetic and sublime, art and its dynamics are given sacred status. In doing so, we lose sight of the transformative power of art; that is, its strength as a platform for trialling ideas, experimentation and how these (again as a political stance) can frame broader discussions. A non-conformist space; ‘a terrain which still enjoys some autonomy and facility for subversion.’ (Rodriguez 2017)

Mnemosyne Bilderatlas and the archive as forensics To define the two types of mechanisms I employed to filter the images I have studied, I tried to explain the differences between the concepts of the ‘archive’ and the ‘atlas’ and their uses in the visual arts and for the two particular cases that serve as problems for this research. The work of German art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929), and in particular the Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, is used as a reference point to underline the methodological approach I have undertaken in the fictional case of The File of 2132-97 Svetoslav S. This approach is in opposition to the case of The Assassination of Viviana Gallardo, which is based on actual political events and has been undertaken by a procedure similar to a forensic investigation.

Sunday-painter is a colloquial expression used in a joking manner to call a person who does art for a hobby and is not invested in art as a profession. The cross was a device designed to torture prisoners and criminals. Gravity, through the weight of their bodies, made victims of crucifiction experience a slow and painful death. While at the same time, being the subjects of a shameful execution. 4 5

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Emanuel Rodríguez-Chaves / Visual Arts

Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Bilderatlas Mnemosyne was the late work of art historian Aby Warburg and consisted of black canvas-like panels used as backgrounds for Warburg to play around with clusters of images such as photographs, reproductions of artwork, postcards and newspaper clippings. These panels served Warburg as a playground to contrast images from antiquity, to be used as an ‘aide memoire’ or memory aid (Warburg Institute). This device gave him the ability to bring to the fore gestures that repeated around different periods and throughout different cultures. Mnemosyne6 is the goddess of memory in Greek mythology. Thus, the atlas Mnemosyne is a memory-device that seeks to spark a liminal space for the interpretation of images; something like a void with the potential for a vision, an ‘inexhaustible’ apparatus. DidiHuberman notes that ‘[Warburg] did not look to bend the notion of atlas to that of a dictionary’ (2018, 243) to explain the meaning of these images. Instead, Warburg used this as a mechanism to explore various thought configurations, anxieties or preoccupations that could have affected the world and been represented by artists. Warburg was aware that Mnemosyne ‘had been, since antiquity, a central figure in the ‘Denkraum’ [or] “thought space.”’ (Didi-Huberman 2018, 224) Mnemosyne works from the anxiety of the multiple, a space full of images that can be configured endlessly, to investigate the connections, gestures or symbols within different periods and cultures and why different people, societies or traditions repeated these.

history that have historically been used to construct particular political narratives. Therefore, Mnemosyne is a decolonising apparatus. Didi-Huberman claims that Warburg’s Mnemosyne is a ‘tool of knowledge’ (Imaging Technologies 2011), just as Freud developed a new form of knowledge about the human psyche, Warburg invented a new form of knowledge from/with images. The Mnemosyne linked images from diverse periods, ranging from myths of antiquity to images of the Renaissance, to even some post World War I events and representations. As an introduction to the atlas Mnemosyne Warburg writes: ‘with its collection of images “Mnemosyne” wants to be first of all an inventory of pre-existing antiquity models that influenced the representation of life in movement and determined the artistic style in the Renaissance era.’ (2010, 3) In his essay ‘La idea de la imagen artística en Aby Warburg’, Fernando Checa (in Warburg 2010) writes that the purpose of Mnemosyne was: To explain through a vast repertoire of images – and another, much smaller repertoire of words – the historical process of artistic creation, in what we now call the Modern Age. Particularly in its initial moments: the beginning of the Renaissance in Italy, focusing on some essential aspects of the late fifteenth century in Florence and looking for its foundations in antiquity. (138-139, my translation from Spanish) For this research, I have appropriated Mnemosyne’s potential for transformation under a somewhat problematic parameter: a language of signs that are repeated throughout history. With this, I wanted to emphasise the constant fluctuation of images, and how particular gestures within the Western history of art are continually used through time to construct narrative and meaning in societies. The dynamic of juxtaposing apparently unrelated images was used to manufacture physical scenarios where I have inserted my practical work. This means that I have used images from different sources; some of these have been used to produce practical outcomes (artworks); some others have been used to dislocate the interpretation of the whole installation by their use as quasi-indexical documents. The use of these devices in the case of the File 2132-97 Svetoslav S. follows an arbitrary decision, enabling a particular reading; that is, the creation of a fiction.

Figure 4: Panel 79. Eating God: Paganism within the Catholic Church. These panels come from the late version of The Mnemosyne Atlas, October 1929.

For Warburg the atlas was a device for ‘Denkraum’, an apparatus to convey ‘the doubled analytical space of a hitherto unseen mental operation.’ (Didi-Huberman 2018, 230) This unseen mental operation that Warburg was interested in, was facilitated by the fact it was not fixed to a specific set of rules. It was for him an Übersicht, overall surveying eye or ‘surveying gaze’ (230). A provocative aspect in the dynamics of the atlas, especially for today’s approach, is that it enabled—as Didi-Huberman argues—‘the emancipation of the gaze’ (Didi-Huberman 2018, 127): a helpful expression in the contemporary understanding of history, inasmuch as it uncovers outdated notions of history and patriarchal and imperialist narratives of art

In the practical work of this research, I have used a methodology akin to Mnemosyne. In the sense that I have accumulated audio-visual material from two anachronistic and geographically distinct cases, which on the surface seem to have no relation at all. After a careful analysis, they begin to show similarities. For example, the silencing and the use of fiction as crucial elements in each particular scenario, the use of images to build and tell stories, and, perhaps one of the most essential aspects, the gaps in the puzzle-like array that tries to represent (and reconstruct) their lives.

‘Mnemosyne [The] Titaness, she was the daughter of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (Earth), and, according to Hesiod, the mother (by Zeus) of the nine Muses. She gave birth to the Muses after Zeus went to Pieria and stayed with her nine consecutive nights.’ (Brittanica) 6

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Warburg’s approach undermines any attempt to make a chronological reading of history and tries to find the symptomatic in universal metaphors of representation. It emphasises the importance of the cultural transference between the so-called Global (economic) North and South that Western historians have overlooked for a long time.

Emanuel Rodríguez-Chaves / Visual Arts

The archive as forensics A different approach was undertaken in the case of The Assassination of Viviana Gallardo. On one of my trips to Costa Rica, I was able to compile a copy of the Judicial File 5190-494, where the murder of Viviana Gallardo was investigated. This document includes the following: testimonies from the victims and those involved in the crime, an autopsy report without images nor diagrams, a reconstruction of the events by the police in both written and visual forms and psychological and sociological profiles of victims and murderer. Additionally, the file contains a large section consisting of the process for the release of Viviana’s killer, officer Bolaños, who after serving a sentence of only six years was freed. I also visited several state libraries where I could review and scan copies of the newspaper La Nación from March to July 1981. This newspaper still represents a quasi-monopoly in Costa Rica’s media, which heavily affects the political and public sector. When I took on the task of studying this case from a creative perspective, my interest emerged from a set of questions around art’s capability to articulate political imaginaries of the past, and asking: through what type of mechanism should art integrate this information? This argument engendered fundamental questions regarding ethical concerns about the manipulation and presentation of particular political information in an artistic platform, whether these issues should be addressed pedagogically, or if art as platform should enable the public to openly interpret the information presented to them. Noting too, the somewhat naïve and irresponsible predicament around art’s ‘freedom’ to work on these types of topic without considering who and what the work is affecting. In 2017 American artist Dana Schutz presented Open Casket at the Whitney Biennial, an oil painting referencing the (in)famous photograph of Emmett Till inside a casket. Till was lynched and killed in 1955 and his mother decided to leave the casket open for people and media to see her son’s disfigured face, as a powerful statement of the situation the African American population experienced at the time. Both Schutz and the Whitney Museum faced heavy critiques. In an open letter, artist Hannah Black (2017) wrote: ‘I am writing to ask you to remove Dana Schutz’s painting “Open Casket” and with the urgent recommendation that the painting be destroyed and not entered into any market or museum.’ The biennial curators defended Open Casket, emphasising the relevance and necessity of this type of work, saying: ‘[by] exhibiting the painting, we wanted to acknowledge the importance of this extremely consequential and solemn image in American and African American history and the history of race relations in this country.’ (Gibson 2017) This controversy represents an example of why the discussion about the use of images is so necessary today. It raises critical questions about how our societies deal with the past and the meaning of particular narratives.

organisations, international prosecutors, environmental justice groups, and media organisations. (Forensic Architecture) Forensic Architecture doesn’t make artworks in a traditional manner (say paintings, sculptures, drawings); its primary purpose is to articulate through evidence material, documents and digital data, the reconstruction of events that have been hidden or modified to create particular narratives. These narratives usually come from governments or institutions that use coercive tactics to disguise their crimes. The work of this collective is of interest to the research as it poses necessary questions around the ethical use of legal documents, especially information gathered under dubious circumstances to present a one-sided narrative. I have used their work as a reference to develop my own, trying to question not only the role of the artist in the process of production but also the handling of the documents within an ethical framework. Pintura or persistence Throughout this research, I have found my work at the centre of theoretical frictions and contradictions. Since the practical work is mostly based on painting (pictorial representations of manipulated photos) and collected images and objects, in essence the practical work delves around the following problematics: images that speak of other images (meta-images); of images that intersect various mediums like photography, painting; image in movement (Cinema, Video Art); and paratext (that is, text that serves for the interpretation of the original work). These complexities have resulted in the following structural dilemmas: 1.

The fundamental question around the relevance of painting today. In particular, the suitability of the medium to create alternative narratives, to tell stories. Thus, I ask: can painting (art) represent the unrepresentable such as trauma, political violence, death?

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The divide between photography and painting. Because of its ability to document moments and objects over time, photography seems to enjoy a mechanical and technical status in the ‘collection’ and documentation of ‘reality’ (indexicality). On the other hand, painting has a different approach and status towards the image, and therefore to photography. Having a sort of je ne sais quoi condition of being able to control the material and the magical at the same time, where the material has to do with the development and execution of the technique (without any emotion, but the mechanical implementation of a craft) and the magical has to do with the representation or animation of what is being presented, without this meaning the painting to be alive.

The information I have collected concerning the case of The Assassination of Viviana Gallardo had to be considered with special care. For this, I consulted artists and collectives that have worked from similar points of departure. An example of this is the project called Forensic Architecture, based in Goldsmith University, London, which have developed what they call an ‘emergent academic field’ by utilising architectural evidence used in legal and political processes around the world. The group defines its purpose as:

Photography is a fundamental part of my practical work and this project in general. The paintings have been designed using a digital or physical collage of found images. Similarly, photography is crucial in the case of The Assassination of Viviana Gallardo. Since there were not many depictions of her persona in the press or public institutions, this has created a vacuum in the representation and meaning within the Costa Rican imaginary.

[A] research agency undertaking advanced spatial and media investigations into cases of human rights violations, with and on behalf of communities affected by political violence, human rights

I grew up ‘understanding’ the world through images, particularly images from books. Since childhood art gave me the chance to not only precisely express myself but to resist, to understand and to

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Emanuel Rodríguez-Chaves / Visual Arts

make by seeing. It allowed me to grasp something from this so-called reality, and make it mine, closer to me. Art was a way to simplify abstract and complex ideas into images. This mechanism was especially helpful growing up in a territory so affected by the ideological, financial and political imposition of the United States of America. Why am I interested in using a medium like painting to do so? Firstly, because there is a friction, a resistance between the material, the producer and the tool. Let’s call this interaction between actors, the technical level of painting, it is a difficult task that requires repetition, patience and craft. Secondly, because of its history and tradition. Painting has been with us for a long time, has died, resuscitated and mutated endlessly. It is still here. The reasons for this can be argued endlessly. I see painting as a language, or a set of languages. We can talk about the gesture, the maker, the ideas that shape the content of the medium, different styles (impressionism, neo-expressionism, abstraction, cubism), the idea of postmodern theories affecting its current production, such as collage, montage, appropriation; and the similarities the medium has with other neighbouring media like photography or film. Thus, painting provides particular qualities from where I can draw and attempt to problematise localised issues around political imaginaries, the construction of narratives, identities and temporalities: it has a flexible condition. Art will serve here as a platform to question its own diffuse condition. Again, to quote Deleuze, art for me, ‘is an act of resistance.’ (Deleuze, 1989) It is resistance because it helps me to articulate ideas and undermine traditional notions of knowledge and narrative, I can play with styles, materials and movements. Painting is promiscuous. At the beginning of this research in 2016 I inquired around the pertinence of the act of painting and if the later exhibition of these paintings was still a relevant undertaking in the current art context and time. Further, if painting with its apparent limitations—around representability and its mechanisms—could be problematised to try to conceive the possibility to find new ways of seeing, and if these new ways of seeing would create a rhizomatic urge to establish connections between other images (not only paintings). Simply, I ask: is this just an urge to resuscitate painting, to keep it alive; placing it together within new media, or making it equal to a screen? Is this all just happening because of the novelty of technology’s new devices? Is painting coming back to counterattack the way these technologies are operating and changing the whole spectrum of art practices today? Is painting a reaction to these? I use the theorist, Isabelle Graw’s concept ‘re-mediatization’ to problematise the role and status of painting today. Graw borrows this notion from Ilka Becker’s essay (2017) The Image as Revenant: Retroactivity and Remediation in the Works of T. J. Wilcox, where she defines re-mediation as: [The] process [that] occurs when the features that have been ascribed to one medium are addressed by another medium […] once the medium can no longer be delimited, then no qualities can be inherent to it. Its character, rather, depends on how the artist will proceed with it. (2014, 47)

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As a commodity and as a contemplative art object.

8

In her text The Value of Painting, Graw questions the values 8 attached to painting and the understanding we traditionally give to the medium. Here, Graw considers painting as ‘a form of production of signs that is experienced as highly personalised.’ (2014, 45) A contemporary discussion about painting today (appropriating her standpoint), cannot be established by using the same strategies from the past, limited to the application of paint on canvas and its future passive appreciation. I claim that in order to be able to use painting as a medium or communicator of sorts, the landscape must be displayed in a different way. In order to communicate something, the structure and its components have to change. The concept of re-mediatisation has served not only to question the conceptualisation and production of paintings (that is, the mechanisms of production) but also to generate questions regarding the context in which these works are placed to be experienced (be they the exhibition spaces) and to work out ways in which painting can flirt with other media such as photography, text and video. And through these dynamics, question the possibility to articulate new narratives? Conclusion or possible significance? We ask ourselves how history is a relative construction that depends on a context (a space to exist), on a transmitter (the medium or body that carries the message) of that information and a legitimating system (a particular society, government, media) for its narrative and identity. We can see, in turn, that the legitimising systems that collect these stories, as is the case of the archive, can be undermined by other more promiscuous, anxious and vulnerable systems, such is the case of the Mnemosyne atlas. This project has a fundamental interest in questioning these legitimising mechanisms, which have long created a so-called cultural gap between the North and South. In turn, these have created an imbalance in the way in which knowledge is produced, and by whom it is made. This research tries to generate incentives, in the form of questions and of the practical, creative works that, in turn, give rise to a terrain of doubt and instability. It serves as an ambitious statement that advocates a return to a much-needed experimental quality that art deserves. This project aims to be inserted into a theoretical current that seeks to separate itself from a western historiographic vision created to analyse the fundamental problems of marginalised areas of the so-called ‘Third World’. It aims to undermine these notions with a more promiscuous and vulnerable approach that wants to question not only the role of art in societies but also the parameters that are used to create history. Taryn Simon (2011) refers to the series of work under the title A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters. Here, she emphasises the fluctuations and anxious aspects of the images we use to create meaning, to make sense of our worlds. She says: [This] mass pile of images and stories forms an archive. And within this accumulation of images and texts, I’m struggling to find

Emanuel Rodríguez-Chaves / Visual Arts

patterns and imagine that the narratives that surround the lives we lead are just as coded as blood itself. But archives exist because there’s something that can’t necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information that’s collected. And there’s this relentless persistence of birth and death and an unending collection of stories in between. It’s almost machine-like the way people are born and people die, and the stories keep coming and coming. And in this, I’m considering, ‘is this actual accumulation leading to some sort of evolution, or are we on repeat over and over again?’ (2011)

Fall, TEDSalon London. “The Stories Behind the Bloodlines.” TEDSalon London Fall, https://www.ted.com/talks/taryn_simon_ the_stories_behind_the_bloodlines?language=en#t-80172.

—

Gibson, Caitlin. 2017. “A White Artist Responds to the Outcry over Her Controversial Emmett Till Painting.” The Washington Post. Accessed July 13, 2019. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2017/03/23/ dana-schutz-responds-to-outcry-over-her-controversial-emmetttill-painting/?utm_term=.45ba78fed678.

Emanuel was born in Costa Rica in 1986. He studied Fine Arts at the University of Costa Rica, San José, Costa Rica from 2005-2012, and at the Kunsthochschule Weissensee, Berlin KhB, under the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) from 2013-2015. Emanuel is finalising a PhD Candidate at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), University of Melbourne, under the supervision of Sanja Pahoki and Bernhard Sachs. Where he was a recipient of a Melbourne Research Scholarship. His research examines images as elements in the construction of memory and knowledge, via databases, printed photos, and digital resources. These images are enhanced and distorted, to modify meaning and agency. —

Forensic Architecture. “About.” Forensic Architecture. Accessed July 2019. https://forensic-architecture.org/about/agency. Galindo, José Regina. 2017. “La Sangre Del Cerdo.” Accessed February 7, 2019. http://www.reginajosegalindo.com/en/ la-sangre-del-cerdo-2/.

Gilles Deleuze on Cinema. Created by Régions, 3 France. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_hifamdISs. Graw, Isabell. 2014. “For an Expanded Notion of Painting.” In Thinking through Painting, 47. Berlin: Sternberg Press. Graw, Isabell. 2014. “The Value of Painting: Introduction.” In Thinking through Painting, 45. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

Bibliography

Huttunen, Tomi. “Montage Culture.” University of Helsinki, http:// www.helsinki.fi/venaja/e-materiaali/mosaiikki/en3/th3_en.pdf.

Andújar, Daniel García. 2017. “The Trojan Horse–Burning the Canon”. Documenta 14”, Accessed February 11, 2019. https://www. documenta14.de/en/public-exhibition/.

Imaging Technologies. 2011. “Atlas. How to Carry the World on One’s Back?” Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe; posted May 20, 2011. Accessed March 2, 2019. https://vimeo.com/24023841.

Becker, Ilka. “The Image as Revenant: Retroactivity and Remediation in the Works of T. J. Wilcox.” Texte zur Kunst, http://gladstonegallery. com/sites/default/files/TJW_TextzurKunst_1209%20copy.pdf.

Linfield, Susie. 2010. The Cruel Radiance: Photography and Political Violence. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Belting, Hans. 2011. Anthropology of Images. Princeton, UK: Princeton University Press. Black, Hannah, and various artist cosignatories. 2017. “Hannah Black’s Open Letter to the Curators and Staff of the Whitney Biennial.” Black Contemporary Art. Accessed July 13, 2019. https://blackcontemporaryart.tumblr.com/post/158661755087/ submission-please-read-share-hannah-blacks. Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Mnemosyne.” https:// www.britannica.com/topic/Mnemosyne. Diccionary, Oxford. 2019. “Mise-En-Abîme.” https://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100201557.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 2005. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1994. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rancière, Jacques. 2007. The Future of the Image. Translated by Gregory Elliott. London; New York: Verso. Rodriguez, Emanuel. 2017. “Mnemonic Fear.” Discursions A+A Online, no. Accessed 22 February 2019.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2008. Images in Spite of All:Four Photographs from Auschwitz. [in Translated from the French.] Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

The Warburg Institute. “Online Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.” University of London. Accessed June 8, 2019. https://warburg. sas.ac.uk/library-collections/warburg-institute-archive/ online-bilderatlas-mnemosyne.

Didi-Huberman, Georges. 2018. Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science, translated by Shane B. Lillis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Warburg, Aby. 2010. Atlas Mnemosyne. [in Spanish] Edited by Martin Warnke. Edición Española de Fernando Checa ed. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, S. A.

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Working with Children A Rights-Based Approach to Contemporary Performance

Sarah Austin Theatre, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say we will never forgive you.

D

(Greta Thunberg, climate activist, aged 16 years. 2019)

espite garnering considerable acclaim worldwide, including exhibiting as part of the 2005 Venice Biennale, in 2008, following a complaint from a high-profile children’s protection advocate, New South Wales police seized twenty art works from the Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Sydney prior to the opening of an exhibition by celebrated Australian photographer Bill Henson. At the time, the NSW Department of Public Prosecutions investigated building a complaint of child pornography against Henson. The works in question were part of Henson’s ongoing investigation into the liminal state of childhood and adolescence, and, as the artist argued at the time, were part of the Western tradition of nudes. Further adding to the public concern was then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s denouncement of the work as ‘disgusting’ and in response to the narratives of sexuality that the work explored, Rudd publicly stated he believed we should ‘just let kids be kids’. There are many ways of framing this moment in Australian art history, and there are questions of authorship, morality, censorship and free speech which all emerge in an interrogation of why this occurred and how it played out in the public arena. There are also many ways to critically and ethically engage with Henson’s complex and beautiful works depicting adolescence. From my perspective, as a theatre practitioner who makes contemporary performance work with and for children and young people (and at the time of the controversy I was the Artistic Director and Chief Executive Officer of one of Australia’s largest government-funded youth theatre companies)1 it became a watershed moment in my practice. I was particularly caught with Rudd’s statement, ‘just let kids be kids’ and the kind of overwhelming popular support this notion seemed to have. What were the discourses that were shaping and defining these understandings of childhood that Rudd was referring to? Who was responsible for creating, circulating and maintaining these ideas? And crucially, for the work I was interested in creating, where was the voice of children in this debate and what agency did they have in addressing these views of them? During the Henson affair children were never

I find myself in a contradictory ethical position when considering Henson and these photographs. I do not see these images as pornographic, and certainly appreciate their artistic value. I am, however, confronted by them, and I recognise this as the point of these images and the conversation they are designed to provoke. As a theatre maker who works with children and young people in a range of contexts, including within schools and community, for Youth Arts organisations, mainstream theatre programs and independent theatre productions, I am acutely aware of the responsibility of constructing the frame from within which the young people are viewed. At times, I have seen contemporary performance work featuring children where I have also felt confronted, and thought that the ethics of creation, and of production, were questionable. Henson’s works, and my experiences over the last decade seeing and making work for adult audiences that features children on stage, raise the very ideas central to this research, questions of how children may function as political symbols in art, and how the process of creation and framing of work needs careful ethical consideration. The last ten years has seen the rapid rise of contemporary and experimental performance works that feature children on stage as

I’m referring here to Melbourne’s St Martins Youth Arts Centre, a 40-year old Youth Arts company that creates original performance work with, by and for children and young people aged between 5-25 years. I occupied the role of Artistic Director/CEO at the company from 2008-2014. https://stmartinsyouth.com.au. 1

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publicly asked for their opinion on the work and it seemed this work was popularly understood as only relevant and suitable for adult audiences. As Australian social theorist Joanne Faulkner has argued and as Rudd’s statement demonstrates, there is a tendency in Western culture to reduce childhood to an idyllic innocence, and to reduce children’s interests to ‘in need of protection’, which ultimately serves to fetishise their vulnerability (Faulkner 2010). In her book The Importance of Being Innocent: Why We Worry About Children Faulkner argues that our focus on children’s vulnerability is a direct result of our ‘rigid understanding of childhood as unworldly, incapable and pure.’ (2010, 10) Adult-child relations are predicated on this political construct of childhood and children as vulnerable and Henson’s work simultaneously disrupts and plays on this dominant idea. Further, the artist’s work also complicates notions of the cultural agency of children and young people by distorting our understanding of who is responsible for controlling the gaze and raising questions about how these photographs have been created.

performers and collaborators, and that are created specifically for adult audiences. Audiences across Europe and Australia have seen Canadian company Mammalian Diving Reflex orchestrate children giving haircuts to adults (2016); young girls dancing with grown men in the UK company Fevered Sleep’s acclaimed work Girls and Men Dance (2016); Melbourne based company House of Muchness and artist Ben Landau create a political party run by children to address children’s policy concerns in The Children’s Party (2017); maverick Belgian director Lies Pauwels create the astonishing The Hamilton Complex (2016) which saw an army of teenage girls on stage with a male bodybuilder; Tim Etchell’s work with Flemish theatre company Victoria CAMPO, That Night Follows Day (2007) in which an ensemble of children echo the common phrases that their parents use to explain the world to them; and Australian artists Samara Hersch and Lara Thoms create a performative conversation between Australian children and child detainees in Nauru in We All Know What’s Happening (2017). This is by no means an exhaustive list. These works are all critically acclaimed, some are made by

(

performance, historical and current pedagogical models of collaborating with children in performance and my own creative practice, I argue for a new model of working with children and young people in contemporary performance that is framed by the human rights charter, the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). I argue that the model of practice I propose in this research challenges the idea of children as vulnerable and in need of protection and instead acknowledges the creativity of children, the recognition of the child’s voice and champions the capacities and resilience of children. As a practitioner working with children and young people and creating work for adult audiences, it has been useful to start articulating my own practice in terms of current methodological thinking in social research with children. My practice (and research) takes a contemporary social science approach that identifies childhood as a social construction and children as competent social agents with the rights and capacities to participate in society. This approach is

My research project aims to investigate what might be an ethical practice when working with children and young people, specifically when that work has been created specifically for an adult audience or context.

Australian artists and all stage ideas of childhood and children that challenge or intervene in the way we are conditioned to perceive these states. My research project aims to investigate what might be an ethical practice when working with children and young people, specifically when that work has been created specifically for an adult audience or context. Through a practice-led enquiry, the research articulates the careful ethical know-how (Senior 2016, 83) that is required to ensure that both the process of making the creative work and the frames we place around the children in the work itself are not exploitative. Further, this study examines whether a rights-based approach to working with children can maintain the capacity that Henson’s work had to resist and confound dominant notions of childhood innocence and vulnerability and expose the ethico-political complexity of the adult-child social contract. By bringing together understandings of the symbolic potential of children in

)

known as the rights-based model of children’s participation and is informed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Over the last three years, my experiences with organisations seeking children’s participation is that too often the expectation of the child’s contribution is to resemble that of adults. It’s important that the inclusion of young people is underpinned by an approach that addresses adult-centric ideas of how and when children should creatively contribute and what that contribution might look like. In my work with children and young people, I advocate strongly that there must be a shared view amongst the adults asking children to participate in their organisational culture (or indeed in their creative endeavours) that understands children as experts of their own experience. This includes a shared acknowledgement amongst adults that children are NOT future people, they are indeed people right now. This philosophy echoes that of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child, responsible for the Children’s Rights Charter. They state that:

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Sarah Austin / Theatre

A shift away from traditional beliefs that regard early childhood mainly as a period for the socialisation of the immature human being towards a mature adult status is required. The Convention requires that children, including the very youngest children, be respected as persons in their own right. The paradigm of children’s vulnerability and their need for protection played a critical role in motivating the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of a Child in 1990. The convention itself goes into some detail about the vulnerable status of children and their need for safeguard and special care (Tobin 2015). Importantly however, the charter confirms the evolving capacity and resilience of children and asserts their rights as cultural citizens and for freedom of cultural expression and thought. The charter is the basis for child-centred pedagogical approaches to practice in the arts and to the evolving thinking in the Youth Arts and Theatre for Young Audiences sector in Australia in relation to children and their cultural, civic and political agency. This positioning of children and childhood as disconnected from ideas of cultural and civic agency is demonstrated quite clearly by the recent public commentary (driven by adults) around children ‘striking’ around the world and leaving school to join marches in cities and towns in support of action on climate change. Inspired by 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg from Stockholm, Sweden, in 2018 and 2019 students from across Australia (and the world) have repeatedly turned out in their thousands to urge governments to make climate change an urgent issue and calling for a range of policy measures including requesting that Australia meet the Paris Agreement emissions targets. This act of political engagement elicited highly contrasting opinions in the public and political arena. There were those who were delighted that young people could be so passionate about matters of public policy and saw great hope for the future. There were also those who believed, including Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan, that children were being used as puppets of the extreme left of politics and argued that if ‘they are not entitled to vote, they are not entitled to strike’. The Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, made this statement in Parliament when urging children not to attend the strikes, and miss half a day or a day of school: We don’t support our schools being turned into parliaments. What we want is more learning in schools and less activism in schools. What the ‘climate strikes’ clearly illustrate is that the idea of children as rights-bearers, as individuals with entitlement to civic and cultural agency, is still decidedly challenging to adult-centric institutions. There was little to no public commentary around the idea that children were not only entitled to be heard and listened to on matters that affect them (in this case, the very serious issue of climate change policy), but that these are rights enshrined in an international legal document that Australia (and many other countries across the world) are a signatory to. It is possible to conclude therefore that despite Australia’s endorsement of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, in practice the dominant attitudes toward children seem to indicate that adults believe children are limited in terms of their capacity to contribute to public discourse, politics, policy and civic concerns.

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Constituent feature of a rights-based approach The rights-based approach I have developed as part of this research enquiry and that I employ as a creative tool in the practice component of this research challenges the orthodoxy of the child as vulnerable and posits instead the agency and capacity of the child. A rights-based approach to creative practice can be understood as a refusal to view the child in a deficit model and focus on all the things they cannot do, and instead focuses on their many and varied capacities and talents. A rights-based approach to creative practice is committed to removing any barriers to equitable participation and address any power imbalances that may be experienced by collaborators. Whilst still concerned with the safety of children, a rights-based approach to working with children is supported by the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child and sees children as rights-holders who therefore have the right to cultural, civic and political engagement in matters that affect them. This approach sits in opposition to much of the current ethics of working with children in education and health contexts specifically, which situate children in a vulnerability paradigm and are concerned primarily with their protection (Tobin 2015, 128). This research positions the ideas of a rights-based framework to working with children as an effective resistance measure to the attitude about children seemingly present in the public response to the climate strikes. I argue that the constituent features of a rights-based approach respond directly to a number of articles within the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child including but not limited to: 1.

Article 12: Children have the right to say what they think should happen when adults are making decisions that affect them and to have their opinions taken into account;

and 2.

Article 13: The child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of the child’s choice.

Drawing on these obligations as framing statements for the intentions of collaborative creative practice, I have developed three key constituent features of a rights-based framework of working with children in performance as detailed below: 1.

Blended methodologies from the practices and philosophies that underpin both Youth Arts and Inclusive Arts

These methodologies include creative approaches to story-sharing, non-verbal, visual and kinaesthetic approaches to developing creative material and play-based enquiries and generative tasks as part of the creative process. 2.

Acknowledging and addressing power imbalances

This includes strategies for creating brave, safe and inclusive spaces for rehearsal and performance, strategies for diffusing knowledge amongst all collaborators and commitments from adult

Sarah Austin / Theatre

collaborators to cede power where possible and resist the expert/ amateur dichotomy inherent in adult child social relations. 3.

Child-led, child-centric contexts and dramaturgies

Adult collaborators must be committed to practices that comprehend children’s rights and respect and take seriously the information children impart. Further, child-led dramaturgies may be in opposition to adult-constructed values and views of what constitutes critically successful performance and these new forms must be embraced as part of a rights-based approach. The creative approach must focus on children’s strengths and capacities rather than their perceived deficits or vulnerabilities and, in doing so, provide a platform for the (sometimes disruptive) insertion of children’s ideas, opinions, views and visions into a range of contexts and discourses. I put these ideas into practice when directing Joseph O’ Farrell (JOF)’s 2019 performance work The Cabin which featured a cast of 11 children aged between 10-12 years, two professional performers and an ensemble of 2nd year Theatre Practice and Acting students from the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). Utilising an auto-ethnographic research approach to the project, and building on my discoveries about children’s symbolic potential in performance, strategies for creative agency and inclusion and my research into models of childhood I investigated a series of creative and aesthetic strategies including: •

Story-sharing

•

Non-verbal and kinaesthetic approaches

•

Strategies for holding space

This practice as research allowed me to test the efficacy of these approaches, specifically how they might foster a creative environment that addresses ideas of ethical participation and power relations. I argue that by privileging children’s voices and ideas, creative artists might foster the cultural agency of children, address some of the ethical tensions inherent in a collaboration between adult artist and child and disrupt adult-centric lenses and ways of seeing and comprehending children. Summary Performance scholar Gigi Argyropolou argues in her article Haunting Dreams of a Wild Future (2018, 92) that ‘…performance operations informed by children bear the potential to offer glimpses of an elsewhere’. Children and performance offer radical imaginaries and ways of rethinking the stalemates of certain neo-liberal political struggles. Likewise, the potential for children to contribute to radical societal re-imaginings and modes of cultural production and practices are manifold. The methods of participation that are used, and ideally co-designed by the relevant child participants, need careful ethical consideration. Argyropolou states that children in experimental performance might produce uses and methods of queering contemporary performance making and argues that ‘children offer a methodology of undoing a performance event’ (2018, 94). Here, she suggests that children in contemporary performance have potential to contest normative futures ‘where the children will be our future’ and rethink established imaginaries and dominant social codes.

Through this project and the application of the rights-based method of collaboration it is possible to envisage how we might have a series of very important conversations with children about the role that they might play in conceiving possible and radical futures. This research suggests that the rights-based model of practice does indeed go some way to addressing the power inequities that create the ethical quandary inherent in an adult-child collaboration, and that the practice can resist the idea of children’s vulnerability and focus instead on their strengths and capacities. However, what this analysis also reveals is that the values and creative strategies that might be part of a process of creation do not necessarily translate to the reception of a finished work on stage. Child agency may not always be visible to an audience and new ways of seeing or interpreting children on stage are still being developed. Consideration of the frames we place around children as artists working in this field, and how they serve to reinforce or subvert understandings of childhood and children, are critical parts of the success of a rights-based approach to the practice of creating performance work with children. The combined practical and written outcomes of this research offer a new, nuanced understanding of children as cultural agents, raising the prospect of a creative process that foregrounds deeper considerations of the strengths and capacities of children and resists the dominant understanding of children as ‘unworldly, incapable and pure’ (Faulker 2010, 10). — Sarah Austin is due to complete her PhD in Theatre at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), where she also works as a sessional lecturer and tutor, in late 2019. She is an award-winning artist with a specific expertise in creating performance work with, by and for children and young people and she has collaborated with a range of arts companies across Australia and overseas. In 2018, she was awarded the Veronica Kelly Prize for Best Postgraduate Paper at the Australasian Drama Studies Association conference and her research has been widely published in national and international journals and book chapters. — Bibliography Argyropolou, Gigi. 2018. “Haunting Dreams of a Wild Future: or What Children have to teach us about politics” Performance Research 23 (1): 91-97. Faulkner, Joanne. 2010. “The Importance of Being Innocent: Why We Worry About Children”, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. Senior, Adele. 2016. “Beginners on Stage: Arendt, Natality and the Appearance of Children in Contemporary Performance” Theatre Research International, 41 (1): 70-84. Tobin, John. 2015. “Understanding Children Rights: A Vision Beyond Vulnerability” Nordic Journal of International Law 84: 155-182. United Nations General Assembly, Convention on the Rights of the Child, 20 November 1989, United Nations, Treaty Series, vol. 1577.

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Indeterminate Self

Evoking the Indeterminacy Between ‘I See’ and Seeing Without the ‘I’ Through Video Medium Youjia Lu Visual Arts, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Abstract

D

oes the ‘I’ (or the Self) permit our seeing or does it prevent us from an immediate experience of what we see? This perplexing question has initiated my artistic research. In this paper, I explore the possibilities of using video art as a medium to directly confront the Self with its ontological/epistemological indeterminacy through a spatial/durational viewing experience. This ontological/epistemological indeterminacy of the Self can be considered as a dilemma between necessitating subjectivity and pursuing immediacy in the act of seeing. I will further the exploration of this kind of indeterminacy by discussing an artistic method that emerges from my ongoing video experiments. I named this artistic method Super(im)position. Technically, Super(im)position denotes an editing method for digital video and moving images. It is a rapid intercutting that is generated by deliberate ‘gaps’ on the timelines of two (or multiple) video tracks resulting in an optical illusion as if the two (or multiple) tracks of video imagery coexist in a superimposition. Conceptually, Super(im)position proposes a liminal ‘gap’ which enables the possible interconnectivity between a visual technique of Superimposition and the quantum theory of Superposition. Superimposition allows two overlapping images to coexist as indeterminate spectres in one frame, whereas Superposition permits two antagonistic states to coexist in an indeterminacy until a direct observation takes place. With its capacity to digitally manipulate time, to create illusory superimposed images, and to induce strobing effects in projection space, Super(im)position aims to test three hypothetical circumstances in which the Self becomes indeterminate through the medium of video art. Keywords: Consciousness, conscious perception, unconscious perception, subjective experience, immediate experience, superimposition, superposition, super(im)position, subjectivity, immediacy. Introduction Let us start the exploration with a small thought experiment: please recall an instance in which you are fully immersed in a sensory experience. Perhaps, this might be the encounter of a dream in which you are overwhelmed by the vivid imagery. In an immediate experience of such visual encounter, you might be merely responding to what you see without thinking of yourself in relation

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to these images. However, once you have a moment to reflect on this experience (such as trying to describe what you have seen in the dream), you might suddenly become aware of your ‘Self’ that is placed in the act of seeing such imagery. Between these two experiences, it seemed to be indeterminate according to when and where the ‘Self’ become present. Therefore, a question arises: does this ’I’ (or the Self) permit your seeing or does it prevent you from an immediate experience of what you see? In fact, this perplexing question is what has initiated my PhD research. In this practice-led research, I explore the possibilities of using video art as a medium to directly confront the Self with its ontological/epistemological indeterminacy through a spatial/ durational viewing experience. This question can be specified as an indeterminacy or dilemma between necessitating subjectivity and pursuing immediacy in the act of seeing. Video, with its Latin etymology (‘videō’) denoting ‘I see’ (Collins 1988, 37), seems to echo such a dilemma: a type of ‘seeing’ that has often already endorsed an ‘I’ and thus becomes less immediate. In this paper, I will reflect on the indeterminacy of the self by discussing an artistic method that emerges from my ongoing video experiments. I named this artistic method Super(im)position. Technically, Super(im)position denotes an editing method for digital video and moving images. It is a rapid intercutting that is generated by deliberate ‘gaps’ on the timelines of two (or multiple) video tracks resulting in an optical illusion as if the two (or multiple) tracks of video imagery coexist in a superimposition. Conceptually, Super(im)position proposes a liminal ‘gap’ which enables the possible interconnectivity between a visual technique of Superimposition1 (Konisberg 1997) and the quantum theory of Superposition (Heisenberg 1927). Superimposition allows two overlapping images to coexist as indeterminate spectres in one frame, whereas Superposition permits two antagonistic states to coexist in an indeterminacy until a direct observation takes place. With its capacity to digitally manipulate time, to create illusory superimposed images, and to induce strobing effects in projection space, Super(im)position aims to test three hypothetical circumstances in which the Self becomes indeterminate through the medium of video art. In the following sections, I will demonstrate these three hypotheses

The visual technique of Superimposition denotes ‘[t]he simultaneous appearance of two or more images over one another in the frame.’

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with my ongoing video experiments. Hypothesis 1: indeterminate self in the shifting perception of time The focus of time in my video experiments is inspired by 19th Century Philosopher Henri Bergson’s notion of pure duration. Differentiating from external simultaneity (i.e the spatialised clocktime), pure duration, according to Bergson, is experienced as an immediate ‘organic whole’ when our ego ‘endures’ the succession of one state ‘melting’ into the other without distinction. This ‘succession without distinction’ highlights the interpenetrative states of consciousness through an immediate experience of pure duration (Bergson 1910, 100). In my Time Experiments, I focused on exploring the ‘gaps’ in time, especially how these temporal gaps contribute to our perceptual experience of movements in the moving images. By digitally cutting the sequence of moving images into slivers of frames and deliberately leaving a ‘gap’ (one blank frame) on the timeline between each successive frame, I intended to evoke the moment when discrete frames start to displace from the sequence

(

would criticise as a mechanistic illusion of reality for it is constituted by adding abstract spatialised time to movement (1998, 322-23). For instance, in the experience of seeing Time Experiment No.2, the viewer might become highly aware of the ‘gaps’ which are normally hidden in the encounter of the cinema. I would suggest that here the gaps, while disrupting the cinematographic illusion, initiates a kind of returning to the Bergsonian pure duration in our perceptual experience. Hypothesis 2: indeterminate self in the shifting space between superimposition and superposition Superimposition refers to a visual technique when ‘[t]he simultaneous appearance of two or more images over one another in the frame.’ (Konigsberg 1997, 363) In early cinema, superimposition was popularised as a visual effect to conjure the apparitional, supernatural, and fantastic. In avant-garde cinema, such as Kenneth Anger’s experimental films, superimposition artistically express the multi-states of consciousness in the experiences

In early cinema, superimposition was popularised as a visual effect to conjure the apparitional, supernatural, and fantastic.

they belong to and slivers of time become interpenetrative and are recomposed in the durational perception of the moving images. We can also see a similar attempt in contemporary video artist Daniel Crooks’ experimental technique ‘time-slice’. According to Crooks (Artist Statement), by time-slicing, ‘thin slices are extracted from a moving image stream and then recombined using temporal and spatial displacement.’ Take his earlier experimental video work Train No.1 for example, the juxtaposition of spatialised time and the interpenetrative pure duration seem to become paradoxically coexisting through digital manipulation of video time and space. Instead of emerging through a singular screen (like Crooks’ video imagery), the displacement, interpenetration and re-composition of my Time Experiments are manifested by the ‘gaps’ crossing the four-channel projection as well as the ‘gaps’ in the flickering light (from the projectors). Perhaps we can associate these temporal gaps (on the video timeline) and spatial gaps (through the projecting light) with how cinema functions. A mechanism which Bergson

)

that are driven by occult delirium. Though in the digital era, this technique might seem to be obsolete, I yearn for a digital re-incarnation of this multi-layering effect and aim to evoke a shift from superimposition to superposition in my video experiments. More specifically, in my method of Super(im)position, a kind of indeterminate figure-ground correlation is manifested through an optical illusion which results from the rapid intercutting between two (or multiple) video tracks. Take the perceptual experience of seeing my video experiment Super(im)position: Diffracting Locomotion (…) for example, the viewer might see images laying on top of one another when in fact these images are rapidly alternating. I called this a phenomenological ‘superimposition’ for the fact that there is no figure-ground distinction and thus deviating from a factual superimposition. The indeterminate figure-ground correlation in phenomenological ‘superimposition’ could be seen as echoing architect and philosopher Peter Eisenman’s remark. According to Eisenman ‘superimposition’ refers to a vertical layering differentiating between ground and figure; whereas ‘superposition’ refers to

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a horizontal layering where there is no stable ground, ground and figure fluctuate between one another (Eisenman 1999, 30). This distinction allows me to further hypothesise the phenomenological ‘superimposition’ that emerges from my video experiments is logically a ‘superposition’. This is clearly shown in my video experiment Super(im)position: Diffracting Locomotion (…). In a durational experience of this video experiment, the viewer might find an illusory perception has been triggered through which he/ she sees the successive 12 frames of images start to penetrate through one another, which forms the so-called phenomenological ‘superimposition’. At the same time, when the 12 frames are perceived as if they are in a coextensive fluctuation and intercut one another horizontally across the screen, the ‘figure-ground’ spatial correlation between different layers of images is transformed into a condition of indeterminacy. Indeed, this video experiment was inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s studies of ‘Human and Animal Locomotion’ and Werner Heisenberg’s ‘Indeterminacy Principle’ of Quantum Physics. It explores a possible shift in perception from seeing with dichotomy (such as here or there, now or then) to a new type of vision to ‘see’ with the superposing probabilities of here (and/or) there, now (and/or) than. Here, it is also possible to consider that the perceptual limitation in our encounter of this video echoes the kind of epistemological deficiency Heisenberg states in his quantum indeterminacy principle: ‘the more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.’ (Heisenberg 1927) I would thus propose that not only does the indeterminacy of this video condition the Self in a fluctuating figure-ground spatial correlation but also it potentiates a kind of probabilistic vision to ‘see’ coexisting properties (such as here/ there) which might only be possible in a quantum superposition. Hypothesis 3: indeterminate self in a flicker-induced hallucination ‘Flicker-induced hallucination’ ‘denote[s] a type of geometric visual hallucination induced by a flickering light.’ (Blom 2009, 410). An encounter of this type of hallucination inspired artist Brion Gysin in the 1960s to invent his famous Dream Machine: a device that produces visual stimuli from stroboscopic flicker to cause viewers to enter a hypnagogic state and ‘see’ things with their eyes closed.

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In my video experiment, I explore the inversion between ‘seeing

with eyes closed’ and ‘blindness with eyes opened’ in a flicker-induced hallucination. I propose a hypothetical (un)conscious perception existing as a liminal state between conscious perception (‘seeing’ through subjective experience) and unconscious perception (‘seeing’ without the subjective experience of seeing). This (un) conscious perception is possible to be induced by the mechanism of Super(im)position. Take Super(im)posed I: Never End Loop for example, the rapid intercutting confronts the viewer with rivalry stimuli of V1 (what is happening in the current moment) and V2 (what has happened a twenty-fifth of a second ago), which generates a faulty perception as if they were superimposed images. In addition to these illusory rivalry stimuli, the ‘gaps’ in V1 and V2 are also essential factors in this visual phenomenon. Focusing on the timeline of V1 and V2, there are numerous ‘gaps’ throughout its successive images. V1 and V2 are compensating one another in a way that they fill in each other’s ‘gaps’, which forms the so-called intercutting. That is, if V1 and V2 had been combined into one video track, the ‘gaps’ would have been cancelled due to an intercutting which would have manifested between the two videos. However, the ‘gaps’ become perceptible in displaying this video as a two-channel projection. By projecting V1 and V2 as individual tracks, the ‘gaps’ blink the beams of light from the projectors which induce a kind of stroboscopic effect in the viewing space. Here I would boldly draw a connection between the temporal/ spatial ‘gaps’ in my videos and Jesse Prinz’s study of unconscious perception. According to Prinz, corresponding to different ranges of duration in which a visual stimulus is presented, a person might have variety of perceptual visual responses: when a person is presented with a visual stimulus for a long enough duration (i.e. 200 milliseconds), he/she can consciously see the stimulus; when this duration is shortened to about 50 milliseconds, a person is aware of the stimulus but cannot identify it specifically; further shortened to below 25 milliseconds, a person does not report seeing the stimulus at all (Prinz 2015). Correspondingly, each ‘gap’ in the timeline of V1 and V2 lasts 1-2 frames (could be converted to 40–80 milliseconds), which is able to trigger a perceptual experience at the intermediate level. At this level, the viewer is able to sense the stimulus but lacks a fully conscious perception to identify it. In other words, the viewer’s perception could be seen as on the verge between losing consciousness and approaching an unconscious state, inducing a possible (un)conscious perception. In this sense, the ‘gaps’ initiate a liminal state between consciousness and unconsciousness in the

Youjia Lu / Visual Arts

viewer’s perceptual experience.

the indeterminate condition of the Self.

Super(im)position and indeterminacy of the self

Lu has shown nationally and internationally at venues such as Counihan Gallery (Melbourne), MARS Gallery (Melbourne), George Paton Gallery (Melbourne), Margaret Lawrence Gallery (Melbourne), Gertrude Street Projection Festival (Melbourne), Columbia University (New York) and Yuan Art Museum (Beijing). In 2015, she has accomplished an artist in residency in Berlin. Her PhD research 'Indeterminate Self' has been presented at various conferences such as the 6th and the 7th Visual Science of Art Conferences in Italy (2018) and Belgium (2019), Digital Cultures in Germany (2018), European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts in Greece (2019).

Orthographically, Super(im)position also centralises the ‘(im)’ as emphasising both the ‘gap’— ‘()’, a non-positional position; and the Self—the ‘Im’ which is equally probable to be permitted/omitted by the ‘gap’ and thus become indeterminate. For the ‘I am’ who confronts this indeterminacy, their experience would thus (as I hypothesised) be an immediate one, which is trembling between the coexisting paradoxical states: the state of sustaining subjectivity (in which the sense of Self is anchored with a subjective experience through conscious perception), and the state of lacking the subjectivity (in which the Self, by pursuing an immediate experience beyond a definite subjectivity, risks losing the sense of Self in a near-unconscious perception). For the (), it might be possible to associate it with a Platonic term ‘Khora’, a receptacle which potentiates the constitution of a sensible world at the same time refusing to be determined with a fixed meaning. In this sense, the gap in my video experiment manifests an indeterminate receptacle. On the one hand, it potentiates both temporally and spatially constitution for the ‘I’ to see; on the other hand, it refuses the ‘I’ to cast a certain way of seeing. Now we return to the question: Does this ‘I’ (or Self) permit our seeing or does it prevent us from an immediate experience of seeing? Hopefully, a possibility has emerged from the exploration of this paper where the dilemma could be resolved by the ‘gaps’ in time, space and consciousness. With such a possibility, perhaps video (the ‘I see’) emphasises neither the ‘I’ nor the ‘seeing’, but a Super(im)position of (Im) Seeing. — Youjia Lu is a Melbourne-based artist. Lu’s current research explores how to evoke an immediate experience of an indeterminate self through digital video art practice. Her ongoing artistic experiments test video’s capacity to digitally manipulate time, create illusory superimposed images and induce strobe effect in projection space. Drawing upon psychoanalytic theories of what precedes the formation of the ego and metaphysical conceptions of time and consciousness, Lu examines different artistic strategies for imaging

— Bibliography Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution (1907) Trans. Arthur Mitchell. Mineola, NY: Dover. Bergson, Henri. 1910. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. London: G. Allen & Unwin. Blom, Jan Dirk. 2009. A Dictionary of Hallucinations. London; New York: Springer Science & Business Media. Collins, John F. 1988. A Primer of Ecclesiastical Latin. Washington D.C.: CUA Press. Crooks, Daniel. "Artist Statement." Nation Gallery of Australia. https://nga.gov.au/fullscreen/06/crooks.pdf. Eisenman, Peter. 1999. Peter Eisenman: Diagram Diaries. London: Thames & Hudson. Heisenberg, W. 1927. "Uber Den Anschaulichen Inhalt Der Quantentheoretischen Kinematik Und Mechanik." Z. Phys. 43: 172-98. Konigsberg, Ira. 1997. The Complete Film Dictionary. New York: Dutton Adult. Prinz, Jesse. 2015. "Unconscious Perception." The Oxford handbook of philosophy of perception: 371-92. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Youjia Lu, Time Experiment No.2, Exhibition Installation View, 2018. Image: *mimesis

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Youjia Lu / Visual Arts

Daniel Crooks, Train No.1, Installation View, 2005. Image: Art Gallery of New South Wales

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Narratives in Meditative Movement Rina Angela Corpus Dance, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Identity is relational. Through the intermingling of stories and the sharing of experiences we create a deep map. A deep map resists the two dimensional flat lineaments of the European explorer’s map; it is palpable and something that is palpable can be touched, and what we touch upon also touches us and in this way we are moved. (Carol Brown, 2003) Introduction

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n writing this research, I create a deep map. As part of my dissertation on somatic encounters with meditative movement, I map-out incipient moments of discovery of an embodied spirituality through meditative movement. I sense how such moments may not be monumental in dance aesthetics and history per se but are nevertheless important in re-tracing a personal journey of arriving at the significant connections that I have found between dance, meditation and spirituality. These are the significant yet subtle points of ideational attention that reflect my personal values and intentions upon which this research is grounded. I come from the autoethnographic impulse of studying culture in the light of selfhood, specifically one’s biographic narratives in the context of cultural understanding. Here I also necessarily tap into phenomenological inquiry, with its experiential mode of writing, allowing for multiple perspectives to emerge and an understanding of how these can be socially and culturally-predisposed.

It is in this general postcolonial context that my lifelong interest was born; out of experiences of silent spaces, moments and movements in my homeland, an experience attended by the presence of Good Shepherd sisters in the Catholic school that I went to from primary to high school2. I would call them spiritual experiences, but not necessarily of the religious kind. They came from a sense of the numinous and transcendence that I accessed even outside the context of organised religious experiences—walking in the school gardens, moving among robust sampaloc trees, sitting in the chapel, sitting quietly on our house rooftop in the hilly village of Antipolo in the late afternoons. To be drawn to silence, to make the body still, and to rest the mind in stillness. And then to move while carrying the ease of being as if holding that still, clear space. The mind free—even in action.3

I embark on this research in multicultural Melbourne, some 3,939 miles from the tropics of Manila, my birthplace where I situate my earliest interest in spirituality and meditative silence.

I felt an enduring affinity for silence and stillness so much so that I have carried a childhood dream of living a contemplative spiritual life, dreaming that I would one day become one of the nuns that I saw run the school. Mesmerised by their simplicity that evoked peace and gentleness, I would find out that they were not just committed to living in peace, but vowed to live by the charism of compassion and social justice: they ardently fought against the repressive martial law regime of Ferdinand Marcos, advocated for women’s rights, upheld indigenous people and urban informal settlers’ rights.

I come from a country of contrasts and contradictions, a nation that

With hindsight, I have learned to see that the presence of nuns in my

So I start off by mapping-out these moments from my life-story in my homeland, the Philippines, from which this research interest has sprung forth. Origins

This is a popular expression used in various historical essays and literature that document the impact and influence of Spanish and American conquest in the Philippines. It is attributed to have been composed by Philippine writer Carmen Guerrero Nakpil and later used by various other authors (See also Cruz Araneta, 2018). 2 I refer to St. Bridget School in Quezon City run by the Religious of the Good Shepherd (RGS), a congregation of nuns founded by a French missionary, St. Mary Euphrasia. The RGS in the Philippines is known for their involvement in social justice movements. I attended their all-girls’ school in Quezon City from 1983-1992. 3 Journal entry, Nov. 8, 2016. 1

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has survived “300 years in convent and 50 years in Hollywood,”1 its people bearing the psychic burden and cultural consequences of Spanish and American colonization, respectively. The result is a culture where East meets West, a compound of various ethnicities and influences: the pre-Hispanic, shamanic natives, and the successive waves of Austronesian, Malay, Indian, Arab and Chinese merchants in the islands, and the inevitable hold of Roman Catholicism via Spanish conquest—a major religion and its culture that still has its strong foothold in the country to this day.

childhood was a mere trigger for a more enduring affinity to silence and spirituality. Even long after that period of fascination for the religious life, the fascination for spirituality has persisted up to now. My first formal dance classes were in ballet school, when I recognised and was immediately drawn to the transcendent power of dance, akin to a spiritual resonance. This psychic synchronicity of being able to dance when I learned classical ballet as a pubescent girl up to my college years, felt like an unearthing of expression in a new language that felt more natural and articulate to me than speaking itself. I recall the attraction to the discipline of keeping the mind in focus with the body in harmonious symmetry that resulted in gracefulness. Ballet followed both order and flow, providing a physical and psychic balance that helped me find my own ‘voice’ beyond the limits of language. Later in college, while writing my thesis on the feminist discourse of dance, I would encounter Christy Adair (1992) who critiqued

(

with dance per se, or my aesthetic affinity with the works of FilipinaAmerican choreographer Kristin Jackson’s dances, whose three specific works, namely, Still Waters, In Passing and Pakiusap, I will be learning and performing. This research originates from my lifelong attentiveness and attraction to embodied spirituality that goes back to my formative years. Holding a very personal inclination towards silent spaces and moments, and the silent spaces that I held in between my moving and dancing. After engaging in a love affair with ballet from high school and eventually dancing with a semi-professional ballet company, the Quezon City Ballet, I later sought to find alternate expressions in modern and contemporary dance. I found dance to be not just a personal expression of the self but also of the numinous, a transcendent space where the still and the silent can find shape, movement and meaning. In using the word ‘spiritual’ I do not exactly refer to the religious

I define meditative movement here as a kinesthetic experience of holding an internal spaciousness and self-awareness in one’s mind while in action, a state of mental equipoise that one can maintain even through quotidian living.

and exposed the patriarchy of the classical ballet system, showing the disempowering attitudes towards women within it. But years later, I would pleasurably read recuperations of this reading, studies that affirm that despite its limits and restrictions for women, ballet offered empowerment in distinct ways to the women who engage in it. Dance theorist Jennifer Fisher, for one, described in her study of women in ballet how it has become an experiential tool for their self-actualization: I doubt if anyone suspected that ballet might help me discover aspects of power, art, dedication, and spiritual resonance. For me and other women I have met in my research, ballet symbolised resistance and independence… (Fisher 2007, 14) And so this research involves more than just a lifelong engagement

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kind, but of a transcendent quality that, as Carla Water opines, brings about ‘self-actualization.’ Walter further states, ‘because of the slipperiness of the definitions and distinctions, I opted to use the term mystical to talk about what happen in the human being who is connected to dance in ways that produce these healing, emotional, communal aspects.’ (Walter in Williamson, 2014) In a similar manner, spirituality has been understood in a non-religious way. On Aurelia Baumgarten’s Tanzphilosophie, Malekin and Yarro (in Meyer-Dinkgrafe 2014) state: ‘spirituality culminates in the full development of mind… any move in the direction of this fullness can be called spirituality’ (394). Similarly, dancer Anne O’Keefe, in defining spirituality as a central element in her dance-making and improvisation, speaks of spirituality as ‘the personal, subjective dimension of religion, primarily concerned with one’s ultimate nature and purpose.’ (2009, 3)

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Rina Angela Corpus / Dance

Meditative movement When I dance I assume a new body. I reach into a sacred and mysterious ground. Gabriel Marcel believes that the modern age in pursuit of technical progress and comfort has lost a sense of the mysterious. If I accept that I am just like everybody else, I am excluded from the mystery of my own body. In dance, however, this mystery is tapped. (Fraleigh 1987, 10) I define meditative movement here as a kinesthetic experience of holding an internal spaciousness and self-awareness in one’s mind while in action, a state of mental equipoise that one can maintain even through quotidian living. This working definition stems from my practice of Raja yoga meditation for the last two decades, which has shaped and heightened my subsequent practice of the movement art of Qigong, also called ‘Chinese yoga,’ as well as my dance expression. Both Raja yoga and Qigong have inspired me to perform dances with the qualities of silence and slowness, a sense of meditative mindfulness, far from the competitive fast-paced ballet world that I grew up learning in my younger years, and the dance culture I was exposed to from subsequent engagements with modern and contemporary dance. This spiritual resonance was also something I palpably felt even as I studied ballet as a young child and prepubescent teen, up to my college years. I recall how I was attracted to the characteristic gracefulness of the classical ballet that followed both order and flow, helping me to find my own personal expression beyond the limits of language. I resonate with dance ethnographer Jennifer Fisher’s assertion of the same, despite ballet’s contested hyper-feminine hegemony: “I had experienced ballet as a positive force in my life, a tool that had facilitated my learning about personal agency, collaborative effort, and spiritual expansion.” (2007, 4) In my adult years, I would discover that dance and movement arts, not just

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Journal entry, November 8, 2016.

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ballet per se, would provide me a language that gave a similar experience of expansion and liberation. While I had glimpses of this silence and its concomitant epiphanies, this yearning found practical fruition through my studies of two meditative spiritual arts: Raja yoga meditation and Qigong. Silence and stillness in Raja yoga meditation ‘Stillness is an unexpected rupture that is inherent in movement. It has the power to displace our expectations of continuity and flow in dance, and it is as necessary as the in-breath is to the out-breath.’4 The above statement has been my succinct reflection after reading the work of Andre Lepecki on stillness, entitled The Still (2000). Beyond what I have read from Lepecki, I am mainly informed by me own embodied experience of these two qualities—stillness and silence. I entwine my conceptions of stillness and silence mainly around my experience of studying and practicing Raja yoga meditation, where both qualities are conceived to be inherent in the human being. Stillness and silence, in Raja yoga, are expressions of a peaceful state of mind, and peace is acknowledged as one of the ‘mother virtues’ of the human psyche, when the soul has not been conditioned or influenced by a state of ‘body consciousness,’ which is an over-identification with the material identity of the self. Silence, in Raja yoga teachings, is said to be the language of the soul. Even before the spoken language, silence itself is the soundless state where the soul can reverberate the energy or aura of its qualities. This will be fleshed out further in a chapter of my PhD dissertation on Layered Practices; Raja yoga and other practices, namely Qigong, Nihon buyō and noh, that inform my thinking and movement process throughout this research.

Rina Angela Corpus / Dance

Meditative dance films My long-time inquiry on the aesthetics of silence and stillness has previously led me to embark on two experimental dance film projects, both set in the natural outdoor spaces of the University of the Philippines where I studied and taught for over a decade. Significantly, in these dance films, I weave my experiences of two meditative arts that I have studied and practiced for over a decade now—Raja Yoga meditation and its practice of karma yoga, or meditation-in-action, and Qigong with its kinesthesia of flowing and ‘breathing’ movements. These short dance films attempt to articulate my experiences of meditative movements through semi-improvised, semi-choreographed collaborative works with emerging Filipina contemporary dancer-choreographer Ea Torrado. Using the backdrop of the forest lagoon in my local campus and its nearby forested vicinities called La Mesa Dam, the dance films reference two feminine icons found in traditional Philippine mythology, specifically the Mutya and Diwata, also known as feminine deities and divine guardians of the natural world. Sacred Space (2013) and Mutya ng Ilog (2016) both explored the narratives of silence and stillness, coupled with my recent interest in spiritual ecology. In my ongoing research and practice in this PhD, I will further explore how my interest in the dance aesthetics of Kristin Jackson, a woman from another generation and context, resonate with my own movement practice. — Rina Angela Corpus is an educator, writer and dance artist with a lifelong interest in spirituality and sacred narratives in culture. She is an assistant professor of Art Studies at the University of the Philippines. Born in Manila, she integrates her long-time practice of Qigong and Raja yoga meditation with her somatic and dance practices, bringing their meditative and poetic resonances into her movement expression. She has studied and performed with the Quezon City Ballet, trained in Limón dance in New York, Nihon buyō in Kyoto, and Qigong in Manila and Australia.

She has published two books in dance, Defiant Daughters Dancing and Dance and Other Slippages (University of the Philippines Press), and has widely written essays on culture and dance for various publications. She has received a project grant from the National Commission for Culture and Arts, and various grants from the University of the Philippines. — Bibliography Adair, Christy. 1992. Women and Dance: Sylphs and Sirens. New York: NYU Press. Brown, Carol. 2003. "How We Are Here: Afterthoughts on Te Pou Rahui." Carol Brown Dances. Accessed October, 2016. http://www. carolbrowndances.com/writings_pubs.php. Cruz Araneta, Gemma. 2018. “In her own words.” Manila Bulletin. Accessed August 30, 2018. https://news.mb.com.ph/2018/08/30/ in-her-own-words/. Fraleigh, Sondra. 1987. Dance and Lived Body. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Fisher, Jennifer. 2007. “Tulle as Tool: Embracing the Conflict of the Ballerina as Powerhouse.” Dance Research Journal. 39 (1): 3-24. Lepecki, Andre. 2000. "Still: On the Vibratile Microscopy of Dance." In Remembering the Body, edited by Gabriele Brandstetter and Hortensia Völckers. Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Publishers. O'Keefe, Anne. 2009. "The Art of Presence." MA Thesis. University of Melbourne. Williamson, Amanda. 2014. "Professional and Academic Reflections 2: Carla Walter Interviewed by Amanda Williamson." Dance, Movement and Spiritualities 1 (3): 451-59.

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Photo: Nicole Paul. Performer: Ioannis Sidiropoulos. Perfection, Science Gallery Melbourne, 2018.

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Sound, Motion and the Brain How Sounds Affect the Creation of Movements Within an Improvised Performance Ioannis Sidiropoulos Dance, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) candidate Introduction

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his interdisciplinary practice-as-research project examines the effects of auditory perception on movement improvisation, and how this informs the creative process of an experimental performance. It hypothesises that there can be a data-based measurable relationship between heard sound(s), brain activity, and movement response(s). The central questions are: how does sound affect the brain during the creation of improvised bodily movements, and how do these sounds influence the movement choices of the performers? This research combines contemporary dance and physical theatre practices and cognitive neuroscience, exploring how response to sound is expressed through brain imaging and movement. The gathered data will be used in developing choreographic processes in dance and physical theatre while the sounds for the experimental processes will be recorded sounds from both music and the environment. Keywords: sound, movement improvisation, movement analysis, dance, physical theatre, fMRI, LMS Methodology The methodology incorporates movement analysis, brain signal analysis, and sound analysis. The hypothesis will be tested through sounds, movement improvisation (behavioural data), and brain signal detection and analysis (neural activity data). The data gathering process has two phases: Gathering behavioural data; a group of performers (Group 1) will improvise, paying specific and primary attention to the sounds (recorded music and environmental sounds) they are hearing. Their movements will be documented through video recording. Gathering neural activity data; Group 1 and a new group of performers (Group 2), while in an fMRI scanner, will be asked to imagine (task A) and watch (task B) movement improvisation recordings from phase 1, while listening to the same sounds. Finally, all the

data, both behavioural and neural, will be compared and correlated for similarities. Following the two test phases, analysis of the sounds will focus on: the sound spectra using Sonic Visualizer, while analysis of movement data will focus on upper, middle and lower body movements using Laban Movement Analysis (LMS). Finally, the analysis of brain activity will be done through fMRI at the Melbourne Brain Centre. Practical Outcome The captured data will be parsed for similarities; where reoccurring movement patterns are detected, based on the sound, movement and brain imaging analysis, those movements will constitute the basis for the final experimental performance. — Ioannis Sidiropoulos is a PhD candidate at Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) at the University of Melbourne. His interdisciplinary research combines dance/physical theatre and cognitive neuroscience, examining how sounds affect the creation of movements within an improvised performance. He is an actor and contemporary dancer with several years of training and professional experience in acting, dancing, drama teaching, and production assistance. He studied Acting in Higher Drama School in Athens Greece and earned his Master’s in Physical Acting and Performance from the University of Kent in the UK. Recent performative experiences include: working with Robert Wilson at the work-in-progress La Traviata Act 1, and presenting two original works (Watermill Center, 2013); actor/performer at the Entita Theatre (UK, 2014-2015); and working with Lucy McRae at the Biometric Mirror Salon and performing at Perfection exhibition opening night (Science Gallery Melbourne, 2018). In addition, Ioannis is creating dance improvisation video-arts, presenting them on his YouTube Channel, of which has been presented at Video Dance Festivals in Greece, China, and Malta.

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Towards Subversive Spectacle in Theory and Practice Jayde Kirchert Music Theatre, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

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first came to the VCA as a student completing my performing arts training in the inaugural Bachelor of Music Theatre course. I worked as a performer in a commercial musical immediately upon graduation, but my career on the musical stage was short lived as I struggled to reconcile my emerging feminist politics with the roles I was being asked to portray and audition for. I experienced the dominant social ideals for female bodies as an unavoidable embodied requirement of participating in the industry as a female-identifying performing artist, which ignited my already elevated awareness of my body and what it was permitted access to. I came to feel increasingly limited by my body. Out of this experience a desire was born: to be part of music-led theatre that enabled alternative and liberating expressions— expressions that could allow me, even for the briefest of moments, to transcend my gender. Within musical theatre I found this to be almost impossible, because, as feminist scholar Stacy Wolf notes, ‘gender inflects and shapes every aspect of the musical’ (2011, 6). The female body—as Wolf (2011) notes—in this context is also shorthand for heterosexuality and is not only essential to the dramaturgy of most musicals, but often plays a starring role in moments of spectacle. In short, the presentation of gender in musical theatre more often than not reflects the status quo. It eventually became clear to me that I would need to create the theatre I wanted to be part of. But how? I turned to the academy. But broadly speaking I found there to be a somewhat apologetic quality to many scholars’ work in musical theatre that speaks to feminist concerns (for example Taylor 2013; Wolf 2002 & 2011; Prece & Everett 2002). For the most part among this literature, alternative ‘readings’ were presented to prove progressive politics and counter-discourse can exist within the populist form after all. Though there is some emerging work that critiques the problematic values and worldviews usually embedded in this form (for example Blair 2016; Schlossman 2002), these were either not explicitly feminist or not all that useful to me as a maker. To consciously develop a practice that would address my political and philosophical concerns, I had to do and read. To start with, I found alignment with the type of feminism described by noted academic and feminist screen and stage critic, Jill Dolan. She talks

In looking for language to appropriately describe feeling and its role in my practice, I turned to Erin Hurley’s (2010) book Theatre & Feeling. Hurley establishes three general categories of feeling: affect, mood and emotion. ‘Mood’ refers to the background mood that is cultivated to prime the audience for a certain kind of response. ‘Affect’ is most likened to the physiological feelings and responses that happen against our conscious will when we are viewing or experiencing something, such as one’s heartbeat quickening, palms sweating, pupils dilating, or visceral experiences. ‘Emotion’ relates to the social contextualisation of the mood and affect. Hurley also introduces the term ‘feeling technologies’ to explain how feelings are made in the theatre. ‘Feeling technologies’ is another way of describing stagecraft elements, as well as encompassing anything that does ‘something with feeling’ (Hurley 2010, 28) including the physical, vocal and other choices actors make. In theatre, feeling technologies are used to produce mood, which primes the audience to experience certain types of affect and perceive particular emotions. This all became incredibly useful in thinking about how a moment of spectacle is created and how it works: it is an intense moment created by multiple feeling technologies coming together to create a strong affective response, primed by a mood and reified by emotional recognition. But I knew there was also something else about the relationships we—audience and creators—have to bodies on stage and their spatial contextualisation that I wanted to interrogate consciously in my practice. I thought about the embodied assumptions creators and audiences have; even from the first moment a character walks on stage we often know how we ought to feel about her and what we can expect for her. This is where Sara Ahmed’s (2006)

She makes a similar argument around race, that, drawing from Edward Said’s theory of orientalism, posits that ‘whiteness’ is in part created by a particular orientation towards white things, whilst Others recede or are excluded. 1

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about feminism supporting ‘women’s right to equality in all realms of social life and culture’—a framework that offers ‘a transformative politics’ (Dolan 2013, 1). As I continued to read, I was also struck by the only unanimous feature common to all feminisms: multiplicity (see for example De Gay & Goodman 2003). Bringing together a desire for socially relevant action and the concept of multiplicity felt like an appropriate starting point for developing a working framework for feminism in my practice, because there would be a commitment to meaningful action whilst creating space for multiple possibilities for how it might look, sound and feel.

work on queer phenomenology has become incredibly useful. A queer phenomenological lens allows us to unpack and question our embodied orientations to things and people in ways that (consciously or not) inscribe heterosexuality. Ahmed traces repeated embodied acts (echoing Judith Butler) as practices which regulate and direct bodies towards heterosexuality.1 To understand one’s orientation phenomenologically, is to examine the ways we are directed towards or away from things and people in the world. It is hard to ignore the ways many musicals rely on orientations that support and reinforce heteronormativity2 and thereby binary notions of gender, since the female body usually stands in for heteronormativity in musical theatre. For instance, the ‘marriage trope’ is one of the most recognisable dramaturgical tropes originating in the Golden Age, where two seemingly incompatible people, a man and a woman, stand in for incompatible groups in society and reconcile this conflict through falling in love and getting married (Knapp 2005, 10; Wolf 2011, 9-10). From page to stage the characters

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of musical spectacle can act upon and frame bodies in ways that confirm and celebrate heteronormativity and the objectifying ‘male gaze’ as the dominant mode of orientation towards female bodies. The cumulative effect of this reflects my experience: that the possibilities for participation in social and cultural life for those with female identifying bodies (to name but one group) become limited and narrow. Spectacle however is not in and of itself problematic. It can be complex, viscerally affective and powerful. As a creator, I am trying to reconfigure the ways music, theatre and movement come together so I can create moments of spectacle involving female identifying bodies that offer an alternative for how we imagine and relate to them on stage and beyond. To do this, my MFA is working towards a feminist dramaturgy for music-led theatre that enables what I have termed subversive spectacle, to be created through and with the female body. My first experiment with subversive spectacle was in 2018 with my theatre company, Citizen Theatre.

Spectacle and musical theatre are often thought of as synonymous, stereotypically consisting of flashy costumes, mesmerising lighting, tap routines and scantily dressed chorus lines of women.

are oriented towards heteronormativity and towards objects and things in a way that supports a normative orientation, reinforced through moments of spectacle. Spectacle and musical theatre are often thought of as synonymous, stereotypically consisting of flashy costumes, mesmerising lighting, tap routines and scantily dressed chorus lines of women. These examples of feeling technologies are engineered to make us feel good about what we’re seeing, sometimes creating positive feelings even if the content is problematic as described by Blair (2016), or as Schlossman notes, by encouraging us to ‘subordinate critical urges to pleasure’ (2002, 153). Feeling technologies in moments

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Regular training & collaborating with Citizen Theatre company members for approximately 9 months led to the creation of Ascent—a new music-led work written and directed by me, in collaboration with company members. In this work, we were deliberate about orienting moments of spectacle involving female bodies away from the norm; that is, away from typical objects and experiences, away from typical uses of feeling technologies, and towards the unknown, unfamiliar and uncommon objects and experiences. With my collaborators, I orchestrated3 the feeling technologies to create a mood where curiosity and weirdness came to be expected by the audience. Similarly, in the rehearsal room I was cognisant of creating an atmosphere of experimentation so as creators we

And whiteness—in terms of its content, casting, target demographic, people in power and leadership. See Hoffman (2014) and Raymond Knapp (2005) for more. Though beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth mentioning the other theoretical framework that I am engaging with—Composed Theatre (see Roesner 2012), which enables me to work in a way that embraces multiplicity dramaturgically. Where a text-centric hierarchy is destabilised and each feeling technology can co-exist, assembled together in the way a composer (of music) might do, to create a moment of affect. 2 3

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Jayde Kirchert / Music Theatre

would continually challenge normative orientations towards things, body parts and people. Many of my notes to my collaborators were variations of ‘that was super weird—let’s go with that.’

deliberately, to propose an alternative orientation to body parts. They fly, dance and find their own individual ways of relating to space. But it’s also charming and incredibly satisfying to see the intelligence of the body celebrated in an unusual way. We are so used to seeing female body parts everywhere—legs selling movies, stomachs selling weight loss, breasts selling—well, just about anything. But we rarely see those body parts with any life, any semblance of personality or intelligence—we are typically oriented towards them as if they are objects used for a particular purpose, without multiplicity or agency. In this show, those body parts were the stars. They got the comedic moments, the celebratory moments and a joyous finale. The actors’ body parts also took on the role of other body parts.

Five actors' individual body parts are assembled to construct the illusion of one unified body.

Ascent was experimental in its use of song and music (composed by collaborator Imogen Cygler), relied on unique physical theatre techniques and aesthetically framed and explored the female body in ways that challenged a normative orientation. It took place in a blackbox theatre and drew inspiration from Dimitris Papaioannou’s (2017) strategic isolation and revealing of multiple individual performers’ body parts to construct a fragmented illusion of one unified body (see Fig 1). Ascent can be thought of as a concept piece, rather than having a complex linear story: we follow a woman as she goes from appointment to appointment, hoping the next procedure will help her feel “forever fresh”. As each body part is “improved”, it disappears for the audience. For instance, when she undergoes a pedicure, her toes fly away from her into the void as the nail polish has its final coat. The same goes for a haircut—as hair is snipped away, it flies off. In this story every inch of her body is changed until there is nothing left—literally, the body parts all fly away scene by scene leaving only a voice in the void by the end. This is of course a theatrical metaphor that proposes the attainment of the social ideal and results in willingly giving up some of yourself. The piece critiques this, implying that such ideals inspire homogenous and irrelevant fixed ideas of beauty. So what happens to those toes once they fly away, or the hair once it has been cut off? In this story, they find a new life with the other discarded body parts. This might sound ridiculous—and it is,

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It is surprising and enchanting to see a variety of flesh coming together in this void to create visual illusions and of course, moments of subversive spectacle: in this example, you can see the body parts of the actors (male and female, white and PoC) came together along with lighting, costume, sound and movement to create a giant face which moves, signalling the moment where the main character receives plastic surgery on her face towards the end of the show. Responses from audiences and critics suggested that the moments of subversive spectacle and the show’s general orientation away from normative ways of relating to female bodies was impactful. For example: ‘Kirchert’s unique world tackles deep questions with zest and comedic flair’ (Theatre Press, 2018); ‘Ascent is an amazing experimental fusion of sight and sound’ (Stage Whispers, 2018); ‘Entertaining and thought-provoking, this is an innovative play that is an echo chamber of the unrealistic beauty standards that remain today’ (BeMelbourne, 2018). Such responses suggest that this type of music-led theatre merits further development and research. In being subversive, spectacle has the potential to critique, excite, shock, surprise and more. It is important that creators of music-led theatre are aware of the ways we are typically oriented towards female bodies in music-led contexts through the use of feeling technologies, as it will allow us to make alternative choices that ask us to think and feel differently. Through drawing attention to a normative sense of orientation towards things and events and how these can be reinforced through feeling technologies, we can challenge conventional ways of relating to our craft and deepen our work in ways that are politically subversive and personally transformative. By expanding the possibilities for how females are presented and perceived in musical stories, as a society we can start

Jayde Kirchert / Music Theatre

to shift our ideas and expectations for what women can do, achieve and be part of in broader social and cultural life. — Jayde has over 10 years’ experience in the performing arts, having completed a Bachelor of Music Theatre, as well as Post Graduate Diploma of Arts (Anthropology) and currently undertaking a Master of Fine Arts (Music Theatre) at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA). She has directed and written multiple critically acclaimed productions through her company Citizen Theatre. Most recent Citizen Theatre works she has directed include Forgotten Places– an immersive experience at Chapel Off Chapel and Kingston Arts Centre (supported by City of Stonnington and City of Kingston), When The Light Leaves at La Mama Theatre (supported by the City of Melbourne) and Ascent for Theatre Works’ 2018 Melbourne Fringe Festival program, which she also wrote (supported by ShowSupport). In addition to being a teaching artist, she has also been assistant director and dramaturge on many musicals and new works at VCA, as well directing VCA Music Theatre’s Morning Melodies concert at Hamer Hall this year. — Bibliography Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press. “Ascent by Citizen Theatre.” Citizen Theatre Youtube Channel, posted 21 Jan 2019. Videorecording of live performance 28 September 2018 at Theatre Works St Kilda, 1:12. https://youtu.be/ bGEXu-BRPJc?t=60.

Shaped By Women. Portland: Intellect Books. Dolan, Jill. 2013. The Feminist Spectator In Action: Feminist Criticism for the Stage & Screen. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hoffman, Warren. 2014. The Great White Way: race and the Broadway musical. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Hurley, Erin. 2010. Theatre & feeling. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Knapp, Raymond. 2005. The American Musical and the Formation of National Identity. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Papaioannou, Dimitris. 2017. “The Great Tamer”. Posted 2017. Videorecording of live performance, 3:02. https://vimeo. com/221573027. Prece, Paul & Everett, William. 2002. “The megamusical: the creation, internationalisation and impact of a genre.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Musical, edited by William Everett & Paul Laird, 281-300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roesner, David. 2012. Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices, Processes. Bristol: Intellect Books. Schlossman, David. 2002. Actors and Activists: Politics, Performance, and Exchange Among Social Worlds. New York: Routledge. Stage Whispers. 30 September 2018. “Ascent.” Stage Whispers. Accessed 30 September 2019. http://www.stagewhispers.com.au/ reviews/ascent.

“Audiences LOVE Ascent.” Citizen Theatre Youtube Channel, posted 28 September 2018. Videorecording of live performance and audience reactions 28 September 2018 at Theatre Works St Kilda, 1:20. https://youtu.be/BWh9jf-eRXo.

Taylor, Millie. 2013. “Singing and Dancing Ourselves: The Politics of the Ensemble in A Chorus Line (1975).” In Gestures of Music Theater: The Performativity of Song and Dance, edited by Dominic Symonds & Millie Taylor, 276-92. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

BeMelbourne. 27 September 2018. “Ascent Looks At How We Improve Ourselves to Death”. BeMelbourne. Accessed 27 September 2018. https://www.bemelbourne.com/single-post/ascent.

Theatre Press. 30 September 2018. “Fringe Presents Ascent.” Theatre Press. Accessed 30 September 2018. https://theatrepress. com.au/2018/09/30/fringe-presents-ascent.

Blair, Kelsey. 2016. “Broomsticks and barricades: Performance, empowerment, and feeling in Wicked and Les Misérables.” Studies in Musical Theatre vol. 10 (1): 55-67.

Wolf, Stacy. 2002. A problem like Maria: gender and sexuality in the American Musical. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

De Gay, Jane & Goodman Lizbeth (eds). 2003. Languages of Theatre

Wolf, Stacy. 2011. Changed For Good: A feminist history of the Broadway musical. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Mud Map and Motorbike Metaphors for Practice-Led Research Anna Loewendahl Theatre, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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am a lifelong motorbike rider. I have ridden to the moon in kilometres, many of the K’s clocked up travelling from one theatre project to another. Across Australia, New Zealand, Africa, India, South East Asia and the UK, the art of riding and theatre making have become metaphorically bound—You imagine you know where you are going but what will you learn because of the mode of travel and the terrain? At the start of a long ride into the unknown it is helpful to have a mud map. Drawn by someone who knows the landscape, a mud map is marked with a finger or a stick in the dirt, or on a scrap of paper with a pen. It is a rough representation of landscape, with main features and a route through it (2019). Yet the map has artistry and intention too. In this reflective paper, I use the intersecting metaphors of motorbike and mud map to consider my practice in the PhD. In Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff (1980) argues that metaphors shape thinking, determine what we believe and how we act. The motorbike is as a metaphor for the doing of practice, and the mud map a way of thinking about how I, and other researchers, trace the journey in the dirt. Metaphors are powerful, describing one thing in terms of another so it is important to critically reflect on why this metaphor now. Dwight Conquergood (2002, 145) for instance, emphasises that the map as research metaphor is always contestable and that there is privilege written into journey making as a researcher. Indeed, map making, and motorbike riding have colonial overtones of academic self-interested, inappropriate curiosity, or of the fuel guzzling adventurer or voyeuristic visitor. So how does the PhD researcher travel ethically and arrive at new knowledge? By looking at the mud map traced by previous critical researchers. The mud map metaphor As anyone who has ever drawn a mud map knows it requires muddiness to see the tracks most clearly, and muddiness abounds in practice research debates. From defining basic terms, to agreeing on what constitutes new knowledge, little has been settled upon. To complicate matters, different countries express and develop versions of creative research in different ways (Nelson 2013). However, there are two clearly marked tracks that move in a general direction: paradigm and methodology.

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Those who navigate the paradigm track argue for performative research to take its legitimate place beside the scientific and qualitative paradigms. This debate has been advancing for over thirty years in a battle for epistemological turf: What is knowledge? How

do we know this is knowledge? What is valid knowledge acquisition and who decides? (See Piccini 2002). Proponents, including Brad Haseman (2006), Paul Carter (2004), Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt (2007), and Robin Nelson (2013), have all contended with these epistemological challenges. Variously they argue that performative research offers ‘know-how’ (Nelson 2013, 41) and innovative processes to knowledge production. Bolt (2007) views this as artistic research available to others outside of the Faculty of Arts. Yet, Haseman (2019) determines that, although elements of artistic research fall under the umbrella of qualitative research, performative research still has its own set of methods and processes to legitimate its own paradigm. Nevertheless, the idea of a performative paradigm has not emerged solely in the arts, including economics (Sommerfeldt 2014) and health (Leavy 2009, 9). Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul (2008, 11) argues that practice as research in the arts is not trailblazing as it has strategies that are already in use in a range of fields, such as nursing. Nursing is particularly interesting in this map, as praxis is a central aspect of arriving at knowledge in that discipline. Yet, the paradigm track is at times unclear, maneuvering between epistemic claims and the specifics of methodology and methods. The second track on this map is not so much creating a place for practice in academia but the reclaiming and decolonising of methodologies. From a Postcolonial perspective, ignored, forgotten, stolen and rewritten histories and cultural practice are now being acknowledged as ways of knowing. What is being underwritten in this debate is that cultural practices can create and communicate knowledge: Oral narratives, dance, theatre, visual art and song, and ‘all the local, regional, vernacular, naive knowledges at the bottom of the hierarchy’ (Conquergood 2002, 146). The reclamation of these pedagogies of cultural practice is an attempt to reassert the validity of these practices as ways of researching. The second track on the map, therefore asks what is practice as methodology? So far, two tracks are marked to describe the terrain but in reality they cross paths—the paradigm proposes the terrain of knowledge and the methodology proposes the mode and route of research. To explore this, I now turn to the motorbike as a methodology metaphor for practice. The motorbike metaphor I am not the first to choose the art of cycle as a metaphor for

research practice. Nelson uses Pear’s bicycle metaphor of riding to consider the epistemology of practice (2013, 9). Here, Nelson unpacks practical knowledge distinctly into ‘know how’, ‘know what’ and ‘know that’ (2013, 20) reiterating, yet not appearing to make the connection, with Conquergood’s criteria posited eleven years earlier. Despite these separate arrivals via methodology and paradigmatic thinking, to a similar point, it is noteworthy the mutual concern is about cultural democratization of research and the way it is conducted. I follow this thinking in my research into the unpaid theatre practices, focusing particularly on research as a process and ethics within a field of other people’s practice, which adds another complication. I therefore extend the bike metaphor to include landscape. Landscape includes people and their practices encountered during the research and theoreticians in the field, who shape the research direction and ultimate understandings. Just as Nelson, Conquergood and Peter Dallow (2003, 51), have attempted to define the terms, the following playful metaphoric classification is a way to make sense of my own research position.

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insights arise as a result of practicing with the problem (Barrett and Bolt 2007, 5). The practice includes those things I do with my bike, balancing whilst navigating a river crossing, standing up to get a better view of the dirt road. I will also have to try new things, when the conditions change, like riding through bulldust or over corrugations. These are strategies of practice, to find something out. I am not researching my practice but using my practice as the methodology to research a problem outside of my practice. The research may be presented as a performance, if something is discovered about riding the bike, otherwise findings may be presented more conventionally – the focus is on the learnings as a result of practice. I have chosen this mode for my PhD. Practice as research I can do basic tricks on my bike, for example putting my feet up on the handlebars, pulling a wheelie, or switching the engine off to experience the silence of speed. Here, I am researching the

The inquiry, its weight, size, and shape, informs the route I take within the landscape, always carrying this inquiry in mind.

Practice-led research The motorbike is my theatre practice. The research methodology itself is performative (it is doing). I ride the motorbike and I do this through a variety of knowledges gained through experience, the material, haptic, embodied, tacit and performative (Nelson 2013, 37). In everyday terms, I have learnt to balance, coordinate movements, do tricks, assess how the bike will respond to outside stimuli, gauge how well I am riding, carry a pillion, and know how to do basic maintenance. I can be said to have a ‘feel’ for the bike. I am riding within the landscape, carrying my research inquiry like panniers. The inquiry, its weight, size, and shape, informs the route I take within the landscape, always carrying this inquiry in mind. The research is about the landscape yet the landscape informs the way I ride and encourages thinking about riding and vice versa. There is a dialogue between the two. The idea of theory arising from learning in practice, in relation to theory outside of practice, is praxis. New

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practice itself—what can I and my bike do under certain conditions and what can be newly discovered about my bike/bike riding? The inquiry is about the performance practice itself. The researcher is a ‘pracademic’ (Volpe and Chandler 2001) studying their practice, whilst practicing. In the field of theatre, this agrees with Kershaw’s definition, ‘practice may be developing new insights into or knowledge about the forms, genres, uses, etc. of performance,’ (2002, 138). The outcome is likely to be evidenced in the performance of the new skills and discoveries. Practice-based research This lies somewhere between the two above. I picture a motorbike with a sidecar. I may not ask a question but discover as I go about the situational elements of riding with a sidecar. The inquiry is about the way the practice responds to having a sidecar and what new insights this achieves into the bike and sidecar within the

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Anna Loewendahl / Theatre

landscape. The findings may also be conventionally represented or be evidenced in the practice itself. Nelson argues that this methodological approach will most likely result in a book or article (2013, 10). Akin to practice-led research, the focus is also outside of its main practice. Potential ruts, trails and vistas Each mode of practice above are subject to potential ruts to get stuck in and demand a way out – a couple of key issues are reflexivity and researcher voice. In my inquiry, the inkling of a ‘problem’ arose from working with unpaid theatres. I noticed a disjuncture between how unpaid theatres in the many forms (amateur, community, independents, private theatres) are absented, stereotyped or disguised within value debates about theatre. From experience, my curiosity was piqued. Whilst Carole Gray proposes that inquiry is likely to arise from the researcher’s practice and be about ‘the needs of the practice and practioner’ (1996, 3), Andrew McNamara critiques Gray’s centralised position of the practitioner, as inviting solipsistic thinking (2012, 12). Although necessarily cautious, this rut has been significantly addressed in other methodologies. In educational ethnography for instance, Geoff Troman (2003, 3) advises that the researcher is the main research instrument, whilst Christine Sinclair reports on ethno-dramatists performing their own research (2003, 3). The complexity that arises does not preclude critical analysis but the researcher is encouraged to acknowledge their contextual framing in an attempt to assuage unaccounted for bias. This is where map and motorbike become entwined; who the researcher is, how she rides, and what she researches is a result of her past and her practice. For instance, in my pre-PhD practice map, I can trace back my conscientization to the politics surrounding the borders of community and theatre. In the 1990s, I lived in Zimbabwe working in the theatre. I learnt about unbuntu—a Xhosa word for interconnectedness—later to be understood as the spirit of Victor Turner’s Communitas (1969). In township theatre, I experienced the fluidity of onstage/offstage action (and its schisms), and an interactive dialogue between audience and actors that failed to fit into Western theatre etiquette. Zimbabwean theatre also resonated with my childhood growing up in rural England, where old socio-cultural rituals, such as weddings to which all villagers attended, were still functioning. I saw these rituals conventionalised in Western theatre, and then in my own practice. My exposure to improvisational strategies (Barker 1977; Johnstone 1981), performance theory (Schechner 1973, 1994), political theatre (Brecht and Willett 2001), Theatre of the Oppressed (Diamond 2007; Boal 1979, 2000), and critical pedagogy (Freire 1970, 1993) educated me about the interconnection between ritual, theatre, power and politics. This history and my research into the practices of community theatres are now on the same map. It is not the research but from these routes positionality and intent can be viewed. Another shared feature of modes of motorbike practice is that each rider engages their own methods to travel. These are the trails, taken differently if the rider is theatre, visual arts of film, for example. In theatre, both Baz Kershaw (1999, 2015) and Julian Meyrick (2011) argue for theatre and theatre making methods as means to know. The use of methods in applied theatre has also been well documented, arguing for the methodologies of participatory action and community-based research (O’Connor and Anderson 2015). I too use strategies from my interactive theatre practice, but not to ‘apply it’ or make a specific intervention, but to use the methods to address the problem I have identified between theatre practices of others, and the cultural value conversation of theatre.

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My methods are significantly drawn from the interactive theatre of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed. Theatre of the Oppressed uses theatre making to reveal the performative mechanisms of society—to show how we enact our power, ethics, emotions—and how these forces are relational and systemic. However, for me, Theatre of the Oppressed was never the ideal approach in the Australian context—to find an oppressor was a challenge, when the oppressor is ignorance about personal consequences (in a sexual health project) or the domination of cultural ideology (in a binge drinking project) or one’s own psychological perspective (fear of losing face, in a project about water/drought with farmers). My methods evolved in practice that did not decide who was oppressing whom but how everyone carries their own version of reality and how these come into conflict. I now call this process Rehearsing Reality. Equally, it could be called Researching Reality. In my research, I use these methods to articulate multiple understandings held by a group of theatre makers. The methods have the capacity to analyse data as it is created. Boal claims that the actor ‘can see himself in the act of seeing, in the act of acting, in the act of feeling, the act of thinking. Feel himself feeling, think himself thinking’ (1995, 15). I view this ‘metaxis’, as core to the critical research practitioner. Anne Hewson, in ‘Emotions as Data in the Act of Jokering Forum Theatre,’ (2007, 5) links metaxis to Donald Schön’s (1987) idea of reflection-in-action. Sinclair (2015) also evokes this notion as the ethnographic researcher performs her own research as monologues—the capacity to do and know at the same time. Although I have not performed my research, I have used methods developed with many theatres and communities over decades, informed by a variety of methods from interactive theatre, critical pedagogy, physical theatre, and working as a teaching-artist with the Royal Children’s Hospital, Festival for Healthy Living. Methods, like bike trails, take place and are created in the landscape between theory and practice with others. Conversely, offering the reader a vista of what took place in practice is not easy, when the PhD research findings are not demonstrated in practice but on paper. My wheels are often caught in the bulldust of language. How should the PhD’s argument be pitched between academic researcher and artistic researcher? Jillian Hamilton and Luke Jaaniste (2009) offer a solution that connects the contextual model – the theoretical, historical, critical researcher—and the commentary model –the explanatory, reflexive, and subjective researcher. The artist researcher assumes a number of these roles, and a mixture of different genres, and voicing (Hamilton 2009, 8). Nelson also recommends the “imbricating” of theory in practice (2013, 62) which requires maintaining a dialogue, each requiring different expression in the writing. Yet, it is easier drawn in the dirt than navigated. How to account for mechanical (methodological) breakdowns, and subsequent need to be a bush mechanic? Or to describe how the researcher rode through a river crossing and fell in, causing people to laugh, which led to new understandings about the inquiry? Therefore, how theatre practice arrives at theory needs to be mapped out for the reader, whilst understanding that it was by being within the landscape that led to that particular destination. And it is not an easy ride. Here, I have begun to sketch these issues through metaphor as a way to think about practice-led research by thinking about something else. Ironically, my motorbike was stolen in the first year of my PhD. The mode goes but not the ‘know how’ or the mud map, until it is washed away in the next rain, or drawn again by someone else who also has chosen to navigate the terrain. — Anna is a theatre maker: director, animateur, dramaturg, performer and teaching-artist. She works between health, education,

Anna Loewendahl / Theatre

community and performance, motivated by her passion for theatre as a way to make creative sense of life. Before beginning her PhD, Anna was director of TransVision Theatre (2003-2015), making performance to create dialogue within and between communities. These interactive performances explored subjects including: women and drought, domestic violence, sex, love and having a disability, youth and binge drinking, and financial literacy for adults. Anna is committed to compassionate and ethical performance making processes and engagement—often collaborating with people who do not see themselves as theatre makers. Anna has also directed numerous youth and community performances including for Circus Oz (2013), La Mama (2011-2014) and Festival for Healthy Living (Royal Children’s Hospital, 2009- 2014). Anna’s work extends to creating enduring performative events, such as Natimuk Farmers Market (2007- ongoing), and working in partnership with non-arts organisations for example Southern Rural Water to develop a water-trading game for farmer education (2014). Currently, Anna is researching articulations of value in Third Sector Theatre practice. — Bibliography 2019. "Mud Map | Definition of Mud Map by Lexico." Accessed 6/11/19. https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/mud_map. Barker, Clive. 1977. Theatre games: a new approach to drama training. London: Eyre Methuen. Barrett, Estelle and Barbara Bolt. 2007. Practice as research: approaches to creative arts enquiry. London: I.B. Tauris. Boal, Augusto. 1979, 2000. Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press. Boal, Augusto. 1995. The rainbow of desire: the Boal method of theatre and therapy London; New York: Routledge. Brecht, Bertolt and John Willett. 2001. Brecht on theatre: the development of an aesthetic, second ed. London: Methuen Drama. Carter, Paul. 2004. Material thinking: the theory and practice of creative research. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Publishing. Conquergood, Dwight 2002. "Interventions and Radical Research." TDR 46 (2): 145-156. Dallow, Peter. 2003. "Representing creativeness: practice-based approaches to research in creative arts." Art, Design & Communication in Higher Education 2 (1 & 2): 49-66. Diamond, David. 2007. Theatre for Living. Victoria, B.C.: Trafford Publishing. Engels-schwarzpaul, Tina. 2008. "At a loss for words? Hostile to language? Interpretation in creative practice-led PhD projects." Working Papers in Art and Design, 5. Freire, Paulo. 1970, 1993. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London: Penguin Books. Gray, Carole. 1996. "Inquiry through Practice: developing appropriate research strategies." In Pia Strandman (ed) No Guru, No Method? Discussions on Art and Design Research, UIAH, Helsinki: 82-95. Hamilton, Jillian G. and Jaaniste, Luke O. 2009. "Content, structure and orientations of the practice-led exegesis." Art.Media.Design:

Writing Intersections, Swinburne University, Melbourne. 18-19 November. Haseman, Brad. 2019. "Tightrope Writing: Creative Writing Programs in the RQF Environment." Queensland University of Technology. Haseman, Brad 2006. "A Manifesto for Performative Research." Media International Australia incorporating Culture and Policy 118 ("Practice-led Research"):98-106. Hewson, Anne 2007. "Emotions as Data in the Act of Jokering Forum Theatre." International Journal of Education & the Arts 8 (18): 1-21. Johnstone, Keith. 1981. Impro: improvisation and the theatre: London: Eyre Methuen. Kershaw, Baz. 2002. "Performance, Memory, Heritage, History, Spectacle—The Iron Ship." Studies in Theatre and Performance 21 (3):132-149. Lakoff, George. 1980. Metaphors we live by / George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Edited by Mark Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leavy, P. 2009. Method Meets Art. New York: Guildford Press. McNamara, Andrew E. 2012. "Six rules for practice-led research." Creative Industries Faculty; School of Media, Entertainment & Creative Arts. Meyrick, Julian. 2011 "Flesh or Bones?: Qualitative and Quantitative Descriptions of Theatre Practice." Australasian Drama Studies (58):22. Nelson, Robin. 2013. Practice as research in the arts: principles, protocols, pedagogies, resistances. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. O'Connor, Peter, and Michael Anderson. 2015. Applied Theatre: Research:Radical Departures. London; New York: Methuen Drama. Piccini, Angela. 2003. "An Historiographic Perspective on Practice as Research." Studies in Theatre and Performance 23 (3): 191-207. Schechner, Richard. 1973, 1994. Environmental Theater. New York: Applause Books. Schön, Donald A. 1987. Educating the reflective practitioner. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Sinclair, Christine. 2015. "More than we can tell: reflecting on the performing of monologues as a mode of inquiry." Journal of Eductional Enquiry 14 (1): 89-94. Sommerfeldt, Susan C., Vera Caine and Anita Molzahn. 2014. "Considering Performativity as Methodology and Phenomena." Forum: Qualitative Social Research 15 (2). Troman, Geoff. 2003. "Method in the Messiness: Experiencing The Ethnographic Ph.D. Process" In Walford, G. (ed) Doing a Doctorate in Educational Ethnography, pp. 99-118. Boston: JAI Imprint. Turner, Victor W. 1969. The ritual process: structure and anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co. Volpe, Maria R., and David Chandler. 2001. "Resolving and Managing Conflicts in Academic Communities: The Emerging Role of the “Pracademic”." Negotiation Journal 17 (3):245-255.

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Tacktical Aesthetics Some Partial Declarations

Louisa Bufardeci Visual Arts, Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

A

s a proposition, tacktical aesthetics imagines an art practice for myself (a white settler-Australian woman) that seeks to avoid reinforcing and reproducing oppressive political structures. In an attempt to answer the question, ‘What are tacktical aesthetics?’ I am presenting here sixteen partial declarations. They do not provide a definitive answer to that question because tacktical aesthetics are inherently unsettled, self-contradictory and undefinable. Nonetheless these partial declarations provide some framework for understanding them.

of being otherwise,’ it is ‘how we welcome a people to come, a world to come, a movement beyond ourselves, rather than simply affirming what we are.’ (81) In a lecture given to film students at La Fémis in Paris, Deleuze said, ‘Concepts do not exist ready-made in a kind of heaven waiting for some philosopher to come grab them. Concepts have to be produced. Of course you can’t just make them like that… There has to be a necessity...’ (2006, 313) As a concept, tacktical aesthetics is a tool for an alternative paradigm, because there is a need for one.

1.

2.

Tacktical aesthetics is a concept and therefore a tool

Let us never cease from thinking—what is this ‘civilization’ in which we find ourselves? What are these ceremonies and why should we take part in them? What are these professions and why should we make money out of them? Where in short is it leading us, the procession of the sons of educated men? (Virginia Woolf, 1938) It is useful to think about tacktical aesthetics as a concept in the sense developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book What is Philosophy? (1996) and elaborated on by Elizabeth Grosz in her essay The Future of Feminist Theory (2011). (These ideas of the concept follow from Immanuel Kant’s (1998) explanation of human knowledge as a result of the distinct and separate effects of intuition and concepts.) As she works out what the future of feminist theory might be, and precisely what theory is, Grosz aligns theory with Deleuze and Guattari’s specific idea of the concept and situates it within the developing trajectory of the cosmos. She says, ‘Concepts are one of the ways in which the living address and attempt to deal with the chaos which surrounds them’ (78). In other words, concepts are tools. She says that without concepts, ‘we have no horizon for the new, no possibility of overcoming the weight of the present, no view of what might be, only the weighty inertia of what is. Without concepts, without theory, practice has no hope, its goal is only reversal and redistribution, not transformation’ (83).

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Understanding tacktical aesthetics as a concept means seeing it as a way of thinking through the forces that act on contemporary art, and as Grosz says, as a way of addressing a future that is different from the present (80). Thinking a new concept enables an outside to the already determined paradigm of contemporary art. Grosz says, the concept ‘adds to the world… imbues it with the possibility

Tacktical aesthetics, as a concept, might not be adequate

At the same time, American poet and theorist Fred Moten questions the adequacy of ‘concepts.’ When he is talking about the continued invention and use of new concepts he says, ‘… we can’t just keep going on like this. The conceptual apparatuses at our disposal are inadequate and we’re just spinning our wheels in a lot of ways… It doesn’t mean that what’s needed is a new theoretical disposition, it’s really a new set of moral dispositions about how we treat one another and talk to one another. And it goes against the grain of someone being able to achieve an adequate theoretical perspective on things themselves.’ (Moten 2016, 41:26). 3.

Tacktical aesthetics is a tactical concept

I am proposing tacktical aesthetics as a tactic and not as a strategy. Although the recent history of the word ‘tactical’ has military associations, it comes from the Greek taktike techne which means the ‘art of arrangement’ and taktikos ‘of or pertaining to arrangement.’ You can see this meaning in our contemporary word ‘taxonomy.’ The distinction Michel de Certeau makes between actions that are ‘strategies’ and actions that are ‘tactics’ is useful here (1984, 34). For Certeau, a strategy comes from a relationship of power to place, and a tactic is the opposite—it has no ‘proper locus’ and ‘is determined by the absence of power just as a strategy is organised by the postulation of power’ (36-7, 38). Tacktical aesthetics has no strategic power (except that which is in this very acknowledgement). 4.

Tacktical aesthetics is a tacking concept

5.

Tacktical aesthetics are about changing direction while heading into the wind

6.

Tacktical aesthetics is a tacky concept (1)

The extra ‘k’ in the word tacktical points to its tacky nature. Tacktical aesthetics are not, nor claim to be, high art. Horses of very little value. 7.

Tacktical aesthetics is a tacky concept (2)

We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground! (Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1967, 46) Tacktical aesthetics are also tacky because they are sticky. They resist smooth operations and look to a sticky relationality for form and function. 8.

Tacktical aesthetics is a way of tacking things together

The tentacular ones make attachments and detachments; they make cuts and knots; they make a difference; they weave paths and consequences but not determinisms; they are both open and knotted in some ways and not others.

( 9.

(Donna Haraway, 2016, 31)

coexistence, cooperation and social memory’ (2000, 16). Tacktical aesthetics cannot exist outside of this mode of seeing you as part of me, and me as part of you. This is its essence. Relationality is also a feminist concept. Audre Lorde (1984, 123) says: ‘The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.’ Although, what I am proposing is not a new pattern of relating across difference. It is, in fact, a very old one. 10. Tacktical aesthetics is not related to shock tactics The tactics I am discussing here are not related to the concept of ‘shock tactics’ which are a common feature of contemporary politics and art. Shock tactics were arguably used to greatest effect in Australia by Mike Parr in his piece Cathartic action: social gestus No. 5 (1977). In this piece, Parr attached a realistic prosthetic limb stuffed with meat to his congenitally short arm and proceeded to hack it off with an axe. In her essay on the ethical value of producing discomfort through art, Australian artist and scholar Barbara Bolt (2015, 61) writes that ‘as the lifeless arm lay on the table a profound shock registered in the gathered crowd.’ Bolt notes how Jean-François Lyotard’s 1984 essay ‘The Sublime and the Avant-

Tacktical aesthetics are about changing direction while heading into the wind.

Tacktical aesthetics is a relational concept

If you see yourself as part of me and I’m part of you, if we have that relationship then… we can move together. (Aileen Moreton-Robinson, Browning 2016, 00:10:49) Tacktical aesthetics are inspired by Goenpul scholar Aileen Moreton-Robinson’s proposition that racism could be overcome if I see myself as part of you and you as part of me. She says, ‘In Indigenous cultural domains relationality means that one experiences the self as part of others and that others are part of the self; this is learnt through reciprocity, obligation, shared experiences,

)

Garde’ makes the case that shock ‘provides the foundations of the transformative power of art’. (61) Lyotard (1984, 40) paralleled the shock required to achieve the effect of the sublime—the intangible, momentary, awesome effect of art—with ‘hypercapitalism.’ He says, ‘The arts, … pressed forward by the aesthetics of the sublime in a quest for intense effects … must test their limits through surprising, difficult, shocking combinations. Shock is, par excellence, the evidence of (something) happening, rather than nothing at all.’ Noting ‘a kind of collusion between capital and the avant-garde,’ he said, ‘[t]here is something of the sublime in capitalist economy…one thinks one is expressing the spirit of the moment, whereas one is merely reflecting the spirit of the marketplace. Sublimity no longer is in art, but in speculating on art’ (43).

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Louisa Bufardeci / Visual Arts

Social activist Naomi Klein (2007) made explicit neoliberalism’s use of shock to further its own agenda in her book The Shock Doctrine. Tacktical aesthetics does not employ shock tactics because, following Klein and Lyotard’s logic, doing so mirrors and reinforces hegemonic practices. 11. Tacktical aesthetics is underwhelming Without shock tactics or the generation of discomfort, tacktical aesthetics might leave the viewer or participant feeling underwhelmed. Tacktical aesthetics seek to evoke other emotions with the audience, or maybe more radically, no emotions—a state of underwhelm. If shock tactics provide ‘the foundations of the transformative power of art,’ what might an underwhelming tacktic provide? 12. Tacktical aesthetics might be decolonising/deinstitutionalising/ destabilising/ divesting/defamiliarising/deterritorialising The value of thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar. (Theodor Adorno, 2005, 80) In the introduction to the issue of the literary journal Plumwood Mountain called ‘Decolonisation and Geopoetics’, Peter Minter (2016) wrote ‘Decolonisation can be shared by everyone… for everyone needs to take responsibility for imagining their own unique kind of transformation… (W)e have to think about how non-Indigenous form, western form, romantic form, lyrical form, white form, have a responsibility to current and future cultural conditions.’ In her article for Overland, Evelyn Araluen (2017) says settler colonials working in the space of decolonisation are expected to be accountable for their material realities and lived experiences and to take responsibility for the privileges of citizenship. Tacktical aesthetics is a form of divestment from, as Felix Guattari says, the idea of subjectivity as ‘the number one objective’ of contemporary, capitalist society (Guattari and Zahm 2011, 40). It is also a way of ‘getting out of the way’ which is what Australian academic Sarah Maddison proposes progressive Australians do to ensure First Nations people can ‘thrive as equal citizens with other Australians’ (2019, xxxvii, xx). 13. Tacktical aesthetics finds itself in a double bind To learn to see the frame that blinds us to what we see is no easy matter. (Judith Butler, 2016, 100)

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about being in this space as awkward or difficult or uncomfortable or problematic or unsettling (Harney and Moten 2013, Lentin and Titley 2011, Moreton-Robinson 2007, Wynter 2003, Tuck and Yang 2012). Tacktical aesthetics is situated in, but does not occupy, a double bind. 14. Tacktical aesthetic is an ethico-aesthetic Tacktical aesthetics is what Brian Massumi would call ‘an ethical endeavour (2002, xxii). It is an ethico-aesthetic concept. This idea of the ethico-aesthetic was developed in the mid 1990s by Felix Guattari, who in his text Chaosmosis takes further Martin Heidegger’s distinction between aesthetics as an experience and aesthetics as a way of being (1995). 15. Tacktical aesthetics embraces criticality and smuggling as a methodology British-Israeli curator Irit Rogoff (2006) talks about moving from criticism to critique to ‘criticality’. She says, criticality wants ‘to inhabit culture in a relation other than one of critical analysis; other than one of illuminating flaws, locating elisions, allocating blames.’ It means acknowledging that we all live and work under constrained conditions, that we are all subject to a world run in a neoliberal fashion. Working from a space of criticality means, to some extent, having already done the work of critique. Being able to ‘analyse and unveil’ while sharing and ‘living out the very conditions we are able to live through.’ Audre Lorde (1984, 124) similarly said that we need to recognise the ‘old blueprints of expectation and response, old structures of oppression’ that are built within us and that ‘these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a result of those structures.’ Rogoff uses the idea of smuggling to illustrate how criticality can work to transform society in this way. Smuggling is both the subject matter and methodology of her practice; she thinks about smuggling as ‘an operational device’. Tacktical aesthetics is a practice of smuggling. 16. Tacktical aesthetics, as a relational concept, embraces singularisation Tacktical aesthetics is about performing a way of being so that I can see myself as part of you and you as part of me. For Guattari, this is ‘singularisation’ (Guattari and Rolnik 2008, 23). In contrast to neoliberalism’s mode of individualising, tacktical aesthetics is a mode of creativity that aims to produce ‘a singular subjectivity’ (23), that as Rogoff (2010, 42) says is a way of ‘coming together and producing relations and agendas that do not emanate from shared identities, shared ideologies, shared belief systems.’

For a white artist wanting to question privileges, it is necessary to acknowledge the double-bind that this involves. This term defined by Gregory Bateson (1972, 206) refers to what might appear to be an ethical or philosophical paradox but is really an ‘unresolvable sequence of experience’ and ‘a situation in which no matter what a person does,’ they can’t win. Using white privilege to question white privilege or addressing and critiquing and somehow trying to come to terms with the privilege of the institutions that enable art practices creates a double bind. For me, the privilege of being white and middle-class, is undeniable and always there.

Art, for Guattari (1995, 106), ‘engenders unprecedented, unforeseen and unthinkable qualities of being.’ In its effort to embrace relationality, tacktical aesthetics offers people ‘diverse possibilities for recomposing their existential corporeality, to get out of their repetitive impasses and… to resingularise themselves’ (1995, 7).

Indian scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (2013) sees this space of the double bind as an important place to dwell in, and advises not rushing out of it in either direction, too quickly. Others have talked

(Patricia Lockwood, 2019)

17. Tacktical aesthetics is fragile and prone to self-destruction. Everything tangled in the string of everything else. When her cat vomited, she thought she heard the word praxis.

—

Louisa Bufardeci / Visual Arts

Louisa Bufardeci is a Melbourne-based artist, researcher and educator with over twenty years of professional experience. She has participated in major international exhibitions including the NGV Triennial in 2018, the Asia-Pacific Triennial in 2012, and the Asian Art Biennial in 2009. Her work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Melbourne and other cities in Australia and overseas. As well as working on art projects, Bufardeci contributes to the local art community by teaching at various local institutions, volunteering as a guide to contemporary art at her local community centre, and by mentoring young artists. She is currently completing a PhD at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA) looking at the relationship between contemporary art and systems of power. —

Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press. Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The undercommons: fugitive planning & black study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions. Klein, Naomi. 2007. The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books. Lentin, Alana, and Gavan Titley. 2011. The crises of multiculturalism: racism in a neoliberal age. London: Zed Books. Lockwood, Patricia. 2019. "The Communal Mind: The Internet and Me." London Review of Books, 21 February, 11-14.

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Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2000. Talkin' up to the white woman: Aboriginal women and feminism. St Lucia: University of Queensland Press. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2007. Sovereign subjects: indigenous sovereignty matters, Cultural studies. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin. Moten, Fred. 2016. The Black Outdoors: Fred Moten & Saidiya Hartman at Duke University. Duke Franklin Humanities Institute, YouTube. Rogoff, Irit. 2006. Smuggling — An Embodied Criticality. Rogoff, Irit. 2010. "Practising Research: Singularising Knowledge." MaHKUzine Summer. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 2013. An aesthetic education in the era of globalization. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Tuck, Eve, and Wayne K Yang. 2012. "Decolonization is not a metaphor." Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1 (1): 1-40. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1967. Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Blackwell. Woolf, Virginia. 1938. Three Guineas. London: Hogarth Press. Wynter, Sylvia. 2003. "Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/ truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument." CR: The new centennial review 3 (3): 257-337.

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