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Relevant bibliographies by topics / Mythological subject matter in painting and literature / Journal articles
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Author: Grafiati
Published: 24 April 2022
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Consult the top 37 journal articles for your research on the topic 'Mythological subject matter in painting and literature.'
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1
Narivska, Valentyna. "“Aeneid” by Anatolii Bazylevych: Picturesque Mythologization of Poem by Ivan Kotliarevskyi." Академічний журнал "Слово і Час", no.3 (March30, 2019): 92–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.33608/0236-1477.2019.03.92-103.
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The article analyzes 120 drawings by A. Bazylevych, the outstanding Ukrainian artist of the 20th century, created for the editions of “Aeneid” by I. Kotliarevskyi in 1969 and 1970. The subject matter is a look at the drawings in the status of a picturesque author’s myth. The skill of ‘visual intelligence’ of the artist is demonstrated in the picturesque original reading of the poem by Kotliarevskyi as a phenomenon of the Baroque with expressive literary methods of ‘image turning’ that contributed to this process and acquired the significance of historical and literary classics. The assumption as for the artist’s mastering of the Baroque concept of Chyzhevskyi that was popular in the 1960s as well as the single-stage development of the Italian-Ukrainian culture of laughter (according to M. Bakhtin) and appreciation of picture poesis (poetry as painting, according to L. B. Alberti) are suggested. This interaction lined up the picturesque myth of Bazylevych through the artistic transformation techniques of ‘image turning’, burlesque travesty of ‘booklore’. This produced the formation of the mythological image of Aeneas as a ‘black knight’ (in the edition of 1969) in the traditions of Western European literature. The view of life through mythological red colour founded by the legendary book cover reveals the content of the ‘red Aeneas’, being signified with red clothing items, shoes, and above all the red Cossack heraldry on the flag, combining Aeneas with Trojan-Cossacks, representing the ‘red world’. Aenei-myth is considered as a Cossack Sorcerer due to the suffix specificity of H. Cohen and physical plastic with folk content that unite the Trojans-Cossacks with the gods.
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Maxwell, Susan. "The Pursuit of Art and Pleasure in the Secret Grotto of Wilhelm V of Bavaria." Renaissance Quarterly 61, no.2 (2008): 414–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ren.0.0004.
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AbstractThe Grottenhof is a small garden surrounded by painted loggias in the Munich Residence, a palace that served as the seat of the Wittelsbach Dukes of Bavaria beginning in the sixteenth century. Completed between 1582 and 1589, the garden contains an elaborate grottoed fountain, sculpture, and paintings based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The pictorial program of the painted loggias combines images of mythological ardor with illusionistic interlopers from everyday court life who make punning references to the pursuit of love. The sources for the garden can be found in Italian and French prototypes, yet the program of decorations creates a variety of associations that were unique to the patron, Duke Wilhelm V of Bavaria. The material and subject matter also reflect contemporary theories about art, nature, and the ordering of knowledge that informed the earliest cabinets of curiosities, where collections of art and natural objects were brought together in the so-called Kunstkammer. The garden was meant to engage all of the senses in a sanctuary that stimulated sensual thoughts while provoking broader contemplation about creativity and art.
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Georgieva, Tsvetana. "Pan in the Bulgarian literature of Fin de siècle." Bulgarski Ezik i Literatura-Bulgarian Language and Literature 64, no.1 (February9, 2022): 17–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.53656/bel2022-2-tg.
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In the age of the Fin de siècle, the mythological Pan was the subject of numerous interpretations in painting, literature, and the performing arts. The article examines for the first time how the image of Pan fits into the modern Bulgarian literature of the early 20th century - in the works of Emanuil Popdimitrov, Trifon Kunev, Hristo Yassenov and Lyudmil Stoyanov. As an expression of the ideas of the epoch (in the Jugendstil and Secession currents), both in Europe and in Bulgaria, Pan and pantheism apologize for nature, the vegetative principle, youth and childhood, love fire, music and intoxication. The original in the Bulgarian interpretation is the sentimental, sensitive autumn Pan, the parodied Pan / Faun and the old wise man, master of music, and devoid of passion Pan.
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Barringer,JudithM. "The Mythological Paintings in the Macellum at Pompeii." Classical Antiquity 13, no.2 (October1, 1994): 149–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/25011012.
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This article attempts to establish and examine the context of the two remaining mythological paintings in the Macellum, the central market of Pompeii. Panels of Io and Argos and of Penelope and Odysseus grace the interior walls, and while the identification of the Penelope figure has been the subject of debate, she clearly derives from Greek prototypes of Penelope, both material and theatrical. Indeed, scholars suggest that the Io panel and perhaps the Penelope painting as well are copies of Greek panel paintings created by a fourth-century B.C. artist, but it is argued here that their pairing seems to be a Roman creation and that they were part of a larger narrative program. The paintings are compositional opposites and share the narrative technique of depicting moments of quiet tension; this choice of narrative moment is one that began in the Greek world; particularly during the Hellenistic period, and was developed and enhanced by the Romans. Moreover, this interest in creating tension for the spectator, and in the relationship between viewer and image, is also demonstrated by the inclusion of a spectator figure in the Penelope painting. Although the other paintings do not survive, their subjects are known from a nineteenth-century drawing and from nineteenth-century descriptions, and these too share the same narrative technique. If the lost paintings are (also) copies of Greek originals, then the Macellum may have served as a picture gallery for Pompeii's inhabitants. A careful reading of the Macellum paintings (both extant and lost) of Greek myths, their juxtaposition and relationship to each other, and their reception in Roman literature and society reveals that the paintings were arranged as a program, a moralizing ensemble, designed to instruct the viewer on the proper behavior of Roman matrons.
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Kettlewell, Neil. "An Examination of Preferences for Subject Matter in Painting." Empirical Studies of the Arts 6, no.1 (January 1988): 59–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.2190/dfk1-tbc2-jlex-5tec.
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Two samples were used, college students and art museum attendees. Both groups were asked to rank order nine different areas of subject matter in painting in terms of personal preference. No visual examples of the suggested subject matter were provided, although brief descriptions were given when it was deemed necessary. Based on rankings, all samples and the male and female sub-samples of the student sample showed highly significant within and between groups differences. The findings are argued to be contrary to those expected by those holding a position of “relativism” with respect to art. The possibility of a dual system of aesthetics with respect to art judged for personal acquisition and abstract evaluation is discussed.
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., Muhammad Rafiki, I.GustiMadeBudiarta,S.Pd,.M.Pd., and DraLuhSuartini,M.Pd. "KARAKTERISTIK KARYA FINGER PAINTING ANAK-ANAK DI TAMAN KANAK-KANAK AISYIYAH BUSTANUL ATHFAL SINGARAJA." Jurnal Pendidikan Seni Rupa Undiksha 9, no.1 (July22, 2019): 13. http://dx.doi.org/10.23887/jjpsp.v9i1.18775.
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Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk mendeskripsikan (1) alat dan bahan yang digunakan dalam kegiatan finger painting di TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja, (2) proses kegiatan finger painting di TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja, (3) subject matter hasil gambar anak yang dihasilkan dalam kegiatan finger painting di TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja. Sasaran penelitian ini adalah anak-anak kelompok B TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja yang terdiri atas 5 kelas kelompok B. Penelitian ini adalah penelitian deskriptif kualitatif. Pengumpulan data dalam penelitian ini dilakukan dengan teknik (1) observasi, (2) wawancara, (3) teknik kuesioner/angket, (4) dan kepustakaan. Data yang terkumpul kemudian dianalisis dengan cara (1) analisis domain, (2) analisis taksonomi, (3) dan analisis tema. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa (1) alat dan bahan yang digunakan dalam kegiatan finger painting ini adalah panci, gelas, sendok, centong, kompor gas, mangkok besar, mangkok kecil, cat/media warna finger painting, kertas gambar, tepung kanji, tepung terigu, pewarna makanan, air dan minyak goreng. 2) proses kegiatan finger painting di TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja dimulai dari mempersiapkan media dan perlengkapan pembelajaran, mengenalkan media dan mendemostrasikannya, mengarahkan dan membimbing, setelah selesai kegiatan anak bercerita dan guru mengapresiasi serta mengevaluasi hasil kerja anak-anak, akhir kegiatan guru melakukan penilaian dengan menggunakan portofolio. 3) Hasil karya finger painting kelompok B TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja memiliki subject matter dan visual yang beraneka ragam, penelitian ini dikelompokkan berdasarkan pada karakteristik karya yang dihasilkan oleh anak-anak, dan diperoleh hasil sebagian besar karya anak cenderung mengacu pada tipe haptic dan tipe naturalistik, serta bentuk visual yang sering muncul yaitu bentuk rumah, bunga dan orang.Kata Kunci : finger painting, karakteristik, subject matter This study aims to describe (1) tools and materials used in finger painting activities at TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja, (2) the process of finger painting activities at TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja, (3) subject matter of children's drawings produced in activities finger painting at TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja. The target of this study was children of group B TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja which consisted of 5 classes in group B. This study was a qualitative descriptive study. Data collection in this study was carried out by techniques (1) observation, (2) interviews, (3) questionnaire / questionnaire techniques, (4) and literature. The collected data is then analyzed by (1) domain analysis, (2) taxonomic analysis, (3) and theme analysis. The results showed that (1) the tools and materials used in finger painting activities were pans, cups, spoons, centongs, gas stoves, large bowls, small bowls, paints / color media finger painting, drawing paper, starch, flour food coloring, water and cooking oil. 2) the process of finger painting activities in TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja starts from preparing the media and learning equipment, introducing the media and demonstrating it, directing and guiding, after the completion of the activities the children talk and the teacher appreciates and evaluates the work of the children, the end of the teacher's assessment by using a portfolio. 3) The results of group B's finger painting work TK Aisyiyah Bustanul Athfal Singaraja have a variety of subject matter and visual, this research is grouped based on the characteristics of the work produced by children, and the results of most children's work tend to refer to haptic and type types naturalistic, and visual forms that often appear, namely the shape of the house, flowers and people.keyword : finger painting, characteristics, subject matter
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Buchanan, Sophie. "Representing Medea on Roman Sarcophagi: Contemplating a Paradox." Ramus 41, no.1-2 (2012): 144–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0048671x00000291.
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It is one thing to find Medea compelling, another to make her art, let alone funerary art. This article faces this complexity head on by examining Medea's visual identity within a sepulchral context. It interrogates her presence on Roman sarcophagi of the mid to late second century CE. The corpus is not insubstantial—nine intact relief panels plus further fragmentary pieces offer ample testament to Medea's presence in the funerary context. Beyond this sphere, Medea's emotionally charged legacy needs no introduction, and her characterisation—outsider, avenger, semi-divine sorceress, victim and murderer—is fleshed out by her capacity to fascinate and repel. Modern scholarship fans the flames, as she remains a popular subject for scholars of Latin and Greek literature, mythology and gender studies.In contrast, Medea's visual sphere of interest has attracted less in-depth attention. Recent studies have acknowledged the implications of her presence on pots and in freestanding sculpture, and most notably, wall painting is beginning to receive careful treatment. Yet art-historians have been more reluctant to confront Medea within the enclosed and predisposed funerary context. Traditional approaches to mythological sarcophagi more generally have favoured consolado as the dominant mode of commemoration, in which empathy and pothos are paramount and protagonists like Adonis and Endymion seen as positive exempla worthy of analogy and assimilation. The deceased is elevated by association with these figures (an association which is often underlined by the use of a portrait head) and the bereaved reassured by the implied interaction of mundane and heroic, mortal and divine. In this way, desire becomes a gloss for grief and loss is translated as yearning.
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Abramkin,IvanA. "TYPOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS OF CEREMONIAL AND CHAMBER IMAGE IN THE RUSSIAN PORTRAIT PAINTING OF 18TH CENTURY." RSUH/RGGU Bulletin. Series Philosophy. Social Studies. Art Studies, no.4 (2020): 112–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.28995/2073-6401-2020-4-112-127.
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The article is devoted to the thorough research of distinctive features of ceremonial and chamber types of portrait in Russian art of 18th century. The matter drew attention of scientists earlier but the identification of specific characteristics, inherent to each type of portrait painting, is not available in academic literature on the subject at the moment. The need for defining a set of features appears relevant for studies into the portrait painting at the turn of 18th – 19th centuries, which is characterized by combination of particularities peculiar to different variants of image in one artwork. It is the identification of distinctive typological characteristics of ceremonial and chamber portrait that allows to explore certain artworks of the mentioned period more effectivly in comparison with stylistic analysis the use of which is objectively difficult with coexistence of various artistic directions.
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Fischer,SusanL. "Romeo and Juliet and ekphrastic criticism in practice." Cahiers Élisabéthains: A Journal of English Renaissance Studies 93, no.1 (June15, 2017): 107–23. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0184767817705498.
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The act of reading and re-viewing stage performance, of re-presenting or re-visualizing a mise-en-scène through ‘verbal painting’ may be fruitfully considered through the ancient rhetorical process of ekphrasis (‘a speech that brings the subject matter vividly before the eyes’) and its defining quality of enargeia (‘vividness’). It is an approach that makes listeners (and readers) into ‘spectators’. This foray into ancient rhetorical practice, with its focus on impact rather than mere analysis, is intended to penetrate the process of re-viewing and critiquing performance, taking as an example Rupert Goold’s production of Romeo and Juliet with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2010.
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Bois, Yve-Alain. "Letters from Paris." October 169 (August 2019): 38–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/octo_a_00359.
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From 1957 to 1964, Annette Michelson wrote over seventy-five columns and reviews from Paris for the International Herald Tribune, Arts Magazine, and Art International. As Yve-Alain Bois demonstrates, Michelson's subject matter as an art critic during this time was varied, but her tone remained consistent and inimitable, characterized by erudition, irony, and attention to formal detail. Bois quotes from her self-confident appraisals of contemporary painting, traces her burgeoning interest in film, and highlights her particular interest in sculpture, from Daumier's modeled busts to Matisse's small bronze nudes to Tinguely's kinetic machines.
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Baron, Marta. "Anaesthetic gardens. On Metaphysics by Lech Majewski." Journal of Education Culture and Society 1, no.1 (January17, 2020): 49–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.15503/jecs20101.49.55.
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Interpretation of Metaphisics – the novel written by Lech Majewski, is the subject matter of theoretical, aesthetic and antropological considerations. Synthesis of arts: literature, film, painting and theatre, which occur in the novel, opens a perspective of intertextuality and provokes questions about ekphrasis, varied materials, ways of experience mediated by dispositives and reflections on humans among other problems. The crucial point in both: Majewski’s novel and this dissertation, is a triptych painted by Hieronymus Bosch – The Garden of Earthly Delight, which gradually annexes the featured world – becomes a basic figure in trying to show, how the aesthetization of reality brings Wolfgang Welsch’s cahegory of an(a)esthetics.
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Fiorenza, Giancarlo. "Penelope’s Web: Francesco Primaticcio’s Epic Revision at Fontainebleau*." Renaissance Quarterly 59, no.3 (2006): 795–827. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/ren.2008.0370.
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Francesco Primaticcio designed his celebrated Galerie d’Ulysse at Fontainebleau (now destroyed) at a time when the epic genre was being updated and redefined. One of the most popular scenes from the gallery, Ulysses and Penelope recounting their adventures to one another in bed (from book 23 of theOdyssey),was adapted and revised in an independent composition by Primaticcio himself:Ulysses and Penelope(Toledo Museum of Art, ca. 1560). In contrast to the Fontainebleau mural, the artist’s self-conscious, refined pictorial language for his canvas converts epic energy into lyric sentimentality. As a result, Penelope becomes the central focus of the new composition. Through the language of gesture the painting stresses such themes as beauty and desire, and further employs such prized poetic devices as reversal (peripeteia) and recognition (anagnorisis). By responding to the formal prescriptions of both the epic and romance genres, Primaticcio exploits the expressive and visual potential of the Homeric episode in an utterly novel way. The painting opens up questions into ways of reading, viewing, and interpreting mythic subject matter in sixteenth-century France.
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Schmitter, Monika. "TheQuadro da Portegoin Sixteenth-Century Venetian Art*." Renaissance Quarterly 64, no.3 (2011): 693–751. http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/662848.
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AbstractDuring the sixteenth century a symbiotic relationship developed between the form, use, and symbolic associations of the Venetian portego, the central reception and entertainment hall of Venetian palaces, and the paintings that were increasingly commissioned to ornament these spaces. The intended placement of the paintings affected their size, format, composition, subject matter, and contemporary interpretation. At the same time, the works of art themselves reflected upon and helped to define the social meanings of the space and the activities taking place there. Analyzing documentary sources and surviving paintings reveals the degree to which we can speak of thequadro da portegoas a distinctive type of Venetian painting.
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Demchuk, Stefaniia. "Late Gothic (Antwerp) Mannerism: its Origins, Nature and Decline (a Review of the Literature)." Text and Image: Essential Problems in Art History, no.2 (2021): 83–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/2519-4801.2021.2.04.
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This essay does not strive to give a comprehensive review of literature on Antwerp Mannerism, but rather to summarize the focal points of discussions and to outline key roadmaps for further studies. The majority of scholars consider Antwerp Mannerism as a late Gothic style influenced by Italian Quattrocento. Its genesis, however, remains a subject of hot debates. If Hoogewerff argued on the German origins, Vandenbroeck attributed it to an inflow of provincial artists. Whatever were the origins, Expressionist shapes were not inherent to the early Netherlandish painting and the attempt to fuse them with ‘realism’ of the Flemish Primitives seemed a revolutionary breakthrough following the pictorial crisis of the 1480s. Despite a rift in chronology, Antwerp Mannerism has irrefutable similarities with the later Italian Mannerism. Thus exploration of the intellectual and religious context of early sixteenth-century Antwerp art similar to Max Dvořák’s approach can be another direction for further research of the Italian and Spanish Mannerism. The subject matter of Antwerp Mannerist art, too, remains largely unexplored. Dan Ewing’s breakthrough essay showed that the changes in iconography (such as reinvention of the well-known subject) could mark shifts in identity. By no means they are merely ‘anecdotic’ as Paul Philippot stated. What subjects were popular beyond the Adoration of the Magi and why? Were there any secular subjects? How did the iconography of Antwerp art reflect the intersection of different Netherlandish schools of art? How did later artists incorporate the pictorial inventions of the Antwerp Mannerists? Finding an answer to these and similar questions can provide a rich context for further studies on this ‘contrived’ but unique style.
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Tibbe, Lieske. "Aardappeleters." De Moderne Tijd 5, no.3/4 (December1, 2021): 328–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/dmt2021.3/4.006.tibb.
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Abstract Potato eaters. A mundane theme in painting, 1885-1905 In late nineteenth-century Dutch art criticism, the topic of ‘poor people eating potatoes’ seems to have been a kind of litmus test for modern, Realist art. It was a sign of the dissolution of the hierachy of the genres, the decline of idealist painting with its elevated, literary themes, and it marked the emerging popularity of commonplace subjects without specific moral meaning attached to them. Likewise, painting of romantic, picturesque landscapes gave way to the more prosaic theme of hard work in the field. Poor farm workers at their shabby meal of potatoes, the fruits of their labour, were part of this subject matter. ‘Modern’ critics welcomed the shift in topics, ‘conservative’ ones fulminated against what they saw as a sign of decay. Catalogues of Exhibitions of Living Artists (Tentoonstellingen van Levende Meesters) and other expositions have been searched for paintings showing potato eaters, or related images like potato peeling, planting, digging, or potato still lifes. Quantitatively, these exhibitions did not justify the art critics’ rhetoric. Qualitatively, the critics’ aversion to the ‘potato eating’ theme was possibly related to its association with poverty and the imminent physical and moral decay of the lower class of the population. In modern realistic literature potato consumption also stood for degeneration. Partly outside the official art circuity, artists like Mauve, Witsen, Toorop, and especially Van Gogh showed potato production and consumption as ‘The Heroism of Daily Life’.
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Venegas Ramos, Alberto. "Memetic images and the use and representation of the past: The US war of independence and Donald Trump's presidency." HISPANIA NOVA. Primera Revista de Historia Contemporánea on-line en castellano. Segunda Época, no.20 (November24, 2021): 635–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.20318/hn.2022.6472.
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The goal of this paper is to study the forms and uses of the past in digitally-created images that are reproduced in virtual spaces using as an example the famous painting Washington crossing the Delaware (1851) by Emanual Leutze and the subsequent changes and adaptations of this work of art. Based on the latest studies of visual culture, cultural memory and previous literature on the subject matter, we will analyse a case study: digital and virtual images created around Donald Trump's presidency and the memories of the country's war of independence. This paper will aim to define the ways in which new media relate to and use the past as well as to consider those formats as valid sources for understanding the past, as well as active spaces of discussion and debate about past times and their use in the present.
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Sulikowska-Bełczowska, Aleksandra. "Old Believers and the World of Evil: Images of Evil Forces in Old Believer Art." Ikonotheka 27 (July10, 2018): 71–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.5604/01.3001.0012.2318.
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The article considers the Old Believers’ beliefs about, and the manner of depicting, the Antichrist, the end of the world, Satan and the devils. It discusses how both Old Believer literature and philosophy relate to their art, which was created between the second half of the 17th century and 1917. The subject matter includes popular images from Old Believer iconography, such as images of John the Baptist, the Angel of the Desert, the Archangel Michael, the Archistrategos of the Heavenly Hosts, Saint Nicetas fighting a devil, or Saint George slaying a dragon, as well as several illustration sets from various editions of the Old Believer Annotated Apocalypse. Many of the Old Believer icons, drawings and craftworks from various groups and workshops display angels, but also Satan and the devils. The latter may be considered particularly controversial in the light of the doctrine of icon painting and of the Old Believers’ particular beliefs. The article attempts to answer the question as to what reasons stood behind the fear of such representations and why they were ultimately accepted by the faithful.
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Taylor,P.Ruth. "Valerius' Flavian Argonautica." Classical Quarterly 44, no.1 (May 1994): 212–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0009838800017316.
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‘[Valerius'] Argonautica is a story of high adventure, not a poème à thèse’: so stated Garson in 1965. Strand later added that the essential nature of this poem and the choice of subject-matter was determined by poetic inability; he describes the prooemium to Valerius' Argonautica as ‘a recusatio: the theme of the fall of Jerusalem is beyond his powers, and it would instead be treated by Domitian who was fit for such an arduous task; Valerius had to content himself with the theme of an old myth’. It is these two opinions that I wish to question in this article. Indeed, alarm bells immediately sound at Strand's interpretation of the poet's recusatio. It has long been recognized that the original Callimachean recusatio was twisted by the Augustan poets. Gordon Williams analyses their practice thus: ‘They sadly regret that their poor talents will not rise to great subjects – and the subjects to which they will not rise are not the old mythological tales but the great affairs of contemporary Roman history and, in particular, the deeds of Augustus. It is clear, however, that they are using this form of poem to enumerate and praise the great deeds of Augustus, under the guise of proposing their own inability.’ No-one hesitates to agree that Valerius was well versed in the Augustan poets. It is dangerous, therefore, to assume without question that he was deceived by their insincerity. There is in fact good reason to examine the alternative possibility, namely that Valerius understood well the practice of his literary predecessors, that he dared to tread in their footsteps and that he succeeded in the supreme duty of a poet, that is to say, the business of ensuring that ars celavit artem.
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Ujszászi, Zsuzsanna. "The Pre-Raphaelite Journey into the Middle Ages." Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica 7, no.1 (December1, 2015): 29–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ausp-2015-0033.
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Abstract The Pre-Raphaelite artists and poets rejected contemporary conventional style in art, and did not concern themselves with the representation of contemporary life either. They viewed the surrounding social life as sordid, and reached back to the Middle Ages both for technique and subject matter. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and later William Morris found inspiration in late medieval art and literature. They took their subjects from history, legend, religion or poetry, focusing on moral or psychological issues, and expressed fascination for beauty as a value of spiritual nature. This paper examines three of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s medieval fantasy pictures (The Tune of Seven Towers, The Blue Closet and A Christmas Carol), which prompt a meditative and imaginative response through their enigmatic references, and thus attest the mysterious feature of Pre-Raphaelite medieval imagery. The paper discusses their enigmatic nature in the light of William Morris’s early dream poems The Tune of Seven Towers and The Blue Closet, written on the relevant Rossetti pictures. A parallel reading of poem and picture evidences how Pre-Raphaelite medievalism in painting can invite the onlooker for an inner journey through exploring an imagined referential background.
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Kelders, Ann. "De Gouden Eeuw van de Bourgondisch-Habsburgse Nederlanden." Queeste 27, no.1 (January1, 2020): 63–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.5117/que2020.1.003.keld.
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Abstract The Royal Library of Belgium (kbr) has opened a new permanent museum showcasing the historical core of its collections: the luxurious manuscript library of the dukes of Burgundy. Centred around a late medieval chapel that is part of kbr’s present-day building, the museum introduces visitors to medieval book production, the historical context of the late medieval Low Countries, and the subject matter of the ducal library. The breadth of the dukes’ (and their wives’!) interests is reflected in the manuscripts that have come down to us, ranging from liturgical books over philosophical treatises to courtly literature. The Museum places late medieval book production squarely in its historical and artistic context. Visitors are not only introduced to the urban culture that provided a fruitful meeting place between artists, craftsmen, and patrons, but also to the broader artistic culture of the late Middle Ages. By presenting the manuscripts in dialogue with other forms of art such as panel paintings and sculpture, the exhibition stresses that artists at times moved between various media (e.g. illumination and painting) and were influenced by iconography in other forms of art.
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Miller, Toby, Eva Aladro-Vico, and Paula Requeijo-Rey. "The hero and the shadow: Myths in digital social movements." Comunicar 29, no.68 (July1, 2021): 9–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.3916/c68-2021-01.
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The general subject of this analysis is the presence of myths on social media, a heritage of the previous century’s mass culture, and in particular, for social movements. Social movements within networked communication are particularly endowed with mythologies, which draw on mass culture and on societies’ archetypal and psychological backgrounds. This fact justifies the hypothesis that the most effective and popular social movements resort to deeper mythological forms. The specific objective is to describe concrete myths in the language of digital social movements and to review the aspects of mythology in the scholarly literature on mythology from four fields. After tracing contents and impact, a qualitative analysis, focused on two examples justified by their digital origin, is performed: the “Anonymous” movement and “Je Suis Charlie” social mobilisation. Results show the persistence of two mythological motives: the profound hero’s monomyth, playing an essential identifying role, channelled through social networks, with hashtags as slogans, and the related myth of the shadow, the dark, “Anonymous” and hybrid identity. Connections and analogies with other recent examples are discussed ?such as the “Me Too” and “Black Lives Matter” cases?. The conclusion is the clear connection between these two myths and the communicative strength of social movements transmitted through social networks. El tema general de este análisis es la presencia de los mitos en las redes sociales, herencia de la cultura de masas del siglo anterior y en particular, en los movimientos sociales. Los movimientos sociales en las redes digitales se dotan de mitologías, sean retomadas del siglo anterior sean formas del fondo arquetípico y psicológico intemporal. Esta presencia justifica la hipótesis sobre si los movimientos más eficaces y populares recurren a formas mitológicas más profundas. El objetivo específico es describir mitos concretos que aparezcan en el lenguaje de los movimientos sociales específicamente digitales. Se revisan los rasgos de los mitos de acuerdo con los autores más prestigiosos de cuatro ámbitos científicos. Se extraen del rastreo de contenido e impacto dos ejemplos de origen digital: el movimiento «Anonymous» y la movilización social «Je Suis Charlie». Aplicando análisis heurístico, los resultados muestran la persistencia de dos motivos mitológicos muy concretos: el profundo monomito del héroe, que cumple un papel crucial identificativo en las canalizaciones mediante redes como Twitter, a partir del uso específico de los hashtags como eslóganes, y el mito asociado de la sombra, la identidad anónima, híbrida y oscura. Se presentan las funciones y analogías en otros movimientos recientes –como «Me Too» y «Black Lives Matter»–. Se concluye la conexión entre estos mitos y la fuerza comunicativa de los movimientos sociales que se transmiten en las redes.
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Anisimova, Olga Vladimirovna. "Portrait of the writer: the peculiarities of literary technique of Roger Zelazny." Litera, no.4 (April 2021): 145–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.25136/2409-8698.2021.4.35298.
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The subject of this research is the unique literary technique of the prominent American fantasy and science fiction writer Roger Zelazny, the author of the world-renowned novels, such as “The Chronicles of Amber”, “This Immortal”, "The Lord of Light”, etc. The article is dedicated namely to determination of the key peculiarities of the poetics of his works. Special attention is given to characterization of his literary path, its periodization, the impact of Zelazny's predecessors – the authors of science fiction and classical world literature – upon his prose. It is noted that R. Zelazny was fascinated with various mythological systems, such as Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Celtic, and Christian. The scientific novelty of this article lies in the attempt to reveal and systematize the most remarkable features of the works of the American fantasy and science fiction writer, whose impact upon the modern fantasy literature can hardly be overestimated; however it has been poorly studied within the Russian literary studies. The conducted analysis of the poetics Roger Zelazny’s iconic novels, created within the framework of the four main stages, indicates the use such postmodernist literary technique as intertextuality. The matter of R. Zelazny is also characterized by psychologism, interpreted as the author's attention to the meticulous reconstruction of the inner cosmos of the hero, which resembles the result of the writer's passion for the ideas of psychoanalysis. Along with the other representatives of the New Wave, Zelazny was prone to the experiment with forms, as well as to the synthesis of the various fantasy genres. Therefore, many of his novels demonstrate the fusion of science fiction, fantasy, space opera, mystery, and detective fiction.
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Zablotskaya,V.S. "Propaganda Through a Prism of a Photographic Image in the Totalitarian States on the Example of the Third Reich." Discourse 5, no.4 (October29, 2019): 65–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.32603/2412-8562-2019-5-4-65-72.
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Introduction. People have long gone to the invention of the method of fixing objects, phenomena not only with the help of graphic activity, since this method took a lot of time and could not fully convey the appearance of the depicted object. The quality and proximity to reality depended not only on the skill of the artist, but also on the genre in which the painting was performed. And, as a result of a huge number of experiments and invested efforts of a dozen of people, in the XIX century they finally found a different way of fixing everyday life. And photography has become this way.Methodology and sources. The research used data from Internet sources, scientific literature on this subject matter. In the study are used a comparative historical method, a structure-functional analysis, a typological approach.Results and discussion. In this paper, we consider how the same reality was transmitted through the prism of photographic images on the example of the Third Reich. The thesis, which we will try to prove, involving not only the history, but also the data of the survey, is as follows: a photograph can convey the attitude of the state to a person and the place of a person in an ideological society.Conclusion. Thus, this paper deals with the transfer of the desired reality through the prism of photographic images on the example of the Third Reich. The author conducted a survey of respondents. The paper proves the theses of the author based on the carried survey.
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Agratina,ElenaE. "Royal Free School of Drawing by Jean-Jacques Bachelier: Development of Education and Craftwork in France." Observatory of Culture 17, no.5 (November12, 2020): 538–49. http://dx.doi.org/10.25281/2072-3156-2020-17-5-538-549.
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For the first time in Russian, the article reconstructs the history of the free school of drawing founded by the French artist and talented teacher J.-J. Bachelier (1724—1806); analyzes the charter and rules of this institution, its educational programs and practical activities; determines the role in the development of artistic craft in France. The article’s subject matter is multidisciplinary and is located at the intersection of the theory and history of art, art education and pedagogy. In view of the small number of comprehensive studies on the history of art education in France, this study expands the notion of it on the example of this educational institution. The school was opened in Paris at the initiative of J.-J. Bachelier for boys from the craftsmen environment. Although many different schools had been founded throughout France, the educational institution of Bachelier had special conditions of origin and a fortunate destiny — later it became part of the National School of Decorative Arts. From 1750, Bachelier became head of the Painting Department of the Vincennes (later Sevres) Porcelain Manufactory. According to his notes, his first concern was to make specialists. That is why he decided to organize a school where children were accepted from the age of eight and spent six years receiving the highest quality secondary art education of that time. Until now, Russian scientific literature has not paid enough attention to the history of French educational institutions in the field of art, despite the fact that France used to serve as a model for the whole of Europe in this regard. This article partially fills this gap, as well as provides a brief overview of other (less successful, but no less interesting) projects of J. Bachelier, for example, an art school for girls, the brilliant idea of which was never realized.
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Chikarkova, Maria. "Graffiti as a sign: the semiotic approach to the study of the phenomenon." Bulletin of Mariupol State University. Series: Philosophy, culture studies, sociology 9, no.18 (2019): 92–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.34079/2226-2849-2019-9-18-92-98.
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Although graffiti is a well-known phenomenon of street art, there is still no single point of view on this phenomenon (even if it is considered art at all). Both the essence and the manifestations of graffiti remain a matter of debate - there are dozens of different classifications, that they are based on different characteristics. However, the phenomenon has rarely attracted attention from the point of view of semiotics, though it is the semiotic reading of graffiti that makes it possible to understand its nature more deeply. Due to semiotics we could create an integrative classification, which would combine stylistics and subject matter into one system. The article made exactly such an attempt –providing of the semiotic classification of graffiti, based on Ch. Peirce’s classification of semiotic signs. Graffiti is a sign, because it has a material shell of the latter, a marked object and rules of interpretation. It functions within the subculture and signifies the individual's desire to escape from the deterministic nature of urban life (J. Baudrillard). It is a culture of the semiosphere, which continuously gives rise to new connotations and, accordingly, generates new receptions. An important component of graffiti interpretation is the cultural code; it is not read outside the field of conventionality, cultural context. Decoding of graffiti can occur in three ways. From our point of view, it is appropriate to use S. Hall’sclassification. He suggested a scheme for "decrypting" messages in the media, however, in our opinion, his scheme works for any communicative act (including graffiti). He distinguished dominant ("dominant-hegemonic"), oppositional ("oppositional") and negotiated ("negotiated") decoding. In the graffiti situation, oppositional decoding prevails among ordinary recipients (passers-by). U. Eco called this type aberrant, because it provides "decryption" of text with a different code than the one it was created for. Authors of graffiti themselves are often not fully aware of what they createalso. Modern writers use techniques of op-art, Dadaism, surrealism, etc., without being very oriented in all these directions. When graffiti combines different types of art (for example, the combination of painting with literature), it takes into account the features of inter-semiotic translation, which makes the decoding situation even more complicated. We offercreating a semioticclassificationofgraffiti, that might be based on Ch. Peirce’s classification of semiotic signs, whichdistinguishthesigns-copies, signs-indexes, signs-symbols. It could help the essence of graffiti and decode them.
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Duparc,F.J. "Philips Wouwerman, 1619 - 1668." Oud Holland - Quarterly for Dutch Art History 107, no.3 (1993): 257–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/187501793x00018.
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AbstractPhilips Wouwerman(s) was undoubtedly the most accomplished and successful Dutch painter of equestrian scenes in the 17th century. Even so, neither a critical study of his work nor a documented biography has been published. The present essay not only presents the results of archive research but also outlines his artistic development. Besides the seven dated pictures by the artist known by Hofstede de Groot, several others have been discovered. Wouwerman was born in Haarlem, the eldest son of the painter Pouwels Joosten and his fourth wife, Susanna van den Bogert. Two other sons, Pieter and Johannes Wouwerman, were also to become painters. Wouwerman's grandfather originally came from Brussels. Philips probably received his first painting lessons from his father, none of whose work has been identified however, making it impossible to determine the extent of his influence on the son's work. According to Cornelis de Bie, Wouwerman was next apprenticed to Frans Hals. He is subsequently reputed to have spent several weeks in 1638 or 1639 working in Hamburg in the studio of the German history painter Evert Decker. In Hamburg he married Annetje Pietersz van Broeckhof. On 4 September 1640 Wouwerman became a member of the Haarlem painters' guild, in which he held the office of vinder in 1646. In the following years his presence in Haarlem is mentioned repeatedly. In view of the many southern elements in his landscapes it has frequently been suggested that Wouwerman travelled to France or Italy. However, there is no documentary evidence of his having left Haarlem for any length of time. Wouwerman died on 19 May 1668 and was buried on 23 May 1668 in the Nieuwe Kerk in Haarlem. He evidently attained a certain degree of prosperity, going by the relatively large sums of money each of his seven children inherited on his widow's death in 1670 and by the various houses he owned. No confirmation can be found of Arnold Houbraken's often quoted remark that Wouwerman's daughter Ludovica brought a dowry of 20,000 guilders with her in 1672 when she married the painter Hendrik de Fromantiou (1633/34 - after 1694). Wouwerman's oeuvre consists mainly of small cabinet pieces with horses, such as battle and hunting scenes, army camps, smithies and interiors of stables. He also painted sensitively executed silvery-grey landscapes, genre pieces and a few original representations of religious and mythological scenes. Wouwerman was also exceptionally prolific. Although he only lived to the age of 48, more than a thousand paintings bear his name. Even when one bears in mind that a number of these paintings should actually be attributed to his brothers Pieter and Jan, Philips left an extraordinarily large oeuvre. Only a small number of drawings by his hand are known. His pupils include Nicolaes Ficke, Jacob Warnars, Emanuel Murant and his brothers Pieter (1623-1682) and Jan Wouwerman (1629-1666). He had many followers and his paintings were much sought after in the i8th and early 19th centuries, especially in France. Important collections created during that period, including those which form the nuclei of the museums in St Petersburg, Dresden and The Hague, all contain a large number of his works. Establishing a chronology with respect to Philips Wouwerman's work is extremely problematic. His extensive oeuvre notwithstanding, only a comparatively small number of paintings are dated. The style of the signature enables us to date pictures only within wide margins: the monogram composed of P, H, and W was only used before 1646; thenceforth he used a monogram composed of PHILS and W. Wouwerman's earliest dated work, of 1639 (sale London, Christie's, October 10, 1972), is of minor quality. However, during the 1640s his talents improved rapidly. During that period he was strongly influenced by the Haarlem painter Pieter van Laer (1599 - after 1642) with respect to both style and subject matter. This tallies with Houbraken's remark that Wouwerman laid his hands on sketches and studies by Van Laer after that artist's death. Van Laer's influence is evident in Attack on a Coach, dated 1644, in the collection of the Prince of Liechtenstein, Vaduz. Several figures and details are quotations from works by Van Laer. Most of Wouwerman's compositions of the mid-1640os are dominated by a diagonally placed hill or dune covering most of the horizon, a tree - often dead - as a repoussoir and a few rather large figures, usually with horses. Landscape with Peasants Merrymaking in front of a Cottage in the City Art Gallery, Manchester, Battle Scene in the National Gallery, London and Landscape with a Resting Horseman in the Museum der Bildcnden Künste, Leipzig, all dated 1646, are proof that Wouwerman gradually developed his own style; nonetheless, Van Laer continued to be an important source of inspiration. As demonstrated by the four known dated paintings of 1649, the artist had replaced his sombre palette for a more colourful one by that time, and had also adopted a predominantly more horizontal scheme for his compositions. During that same period Wouwerman' pictures came to reflect a growing interest in landscape, and in the first half of the 1650s he produced a number of paintings which bear witness to his mastery of the landscape idiom. In a Landscape with Horsemen, of 1652, in a private British collection, painted in silvery tones, the figures and horses are reduced to a fairly insignificant staffage. Genre elements continued to play an important role in most of his paintings, though. One of his most successful works of that period is the Festive Peasants before a Panorama, dated 1653, in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Perhaps nowhere else in his oeuvre did the artist succeed in producing such a happy synthesis of genre and landscape elements. In the second half of the 1650s Wouwerman painted many of the fanciful hunting scenes - often with a vaguely Italian setting and brighter local colours - which were particularly sought after in the 18th and early 19th centuries. Only a few dated works from the last decade of his life have been preserved, but they do show a tendency towards more sombre colours and suggest a slight decline in his artistic skills. Van Laer's stylistic influence on Wouwerman had almost disappeared by then, although it continued to play a major role in terms of subject matter. After the middle of the 19th century Wouwerman's popularity waned, but more recently his work has met with increasing acclaim.
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Stinis, Marte. "Musical Experience in the Bower: D. G. Rossetti, Listening, and Space." Journal of Victorian Culture, April13, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcac011.
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Abstract This essay traces Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s use of the bower as a visual space in relation to musical subject matter. Following the increasing popularity of instrumental music and musical discourse in the mid-nineteenth century, the idea of art music and its expressive abilities had become a pervasive discourse for painters. Through an examination of Rossetti’s images of bowers with a musical subject – specifically The Blue Bower (1865), Veronica Veronese (1872), and La Ghirlandata (1873) – this essay explores ideas of musical temporality and artistic spatiality, tonal relations between colour and music, and Rossetti’s emphasis on subjective experience in these images. The bower became a crucial feature in this exploration of music and painting, signalling a visual space characterized by ideas of immersion, artistic correspondences, and the abstracting of colour and form. This essay proposes that Rossetti’s bowers were sites of visual immersion for its viewers, alluding and appealing to the sensuous impact music could have on a listener by mimicking listening behaviour in a visual format. My discussion uncovers new contexts for Rossetti’s musical images and draws parallels between listening and viewing behaviour for both the Victorian and current public. The essay concludes that visual sites alluding to music can act as immersive spaces, contending that abstraction and temporality are drawn out in painting by virtue of an appeal to music.
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"VI. Narrative and Images." New Surveys in the Classics 22 (1991): 63–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0533245100022677.
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Greek pottery provides us with a fascinating, if bewildering, variety of painted scenes. It is therefore no cause for astonishment that study of imagery, iconography, narrative method, mythical and contemporary subject matter, etc. should be of major scholarly concern. Scholars work with the evidence they possess but have to keep in mind what is missing - both from literature and from art. The more closely investigated such matters are, the more obvious it becomes that we must be careful to make distinctions between the imagery of different centres of vase production, and also between the imagery in vase-painting and that in other media, especially sculpture. It is inevitable that Athens has been the area most intensively probed, and that myth has been the most attractive magnet.
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Howley, Ellen. "The sea and memory: Poetic reconsiderations of the Zong massacre." Journal of Commonwealth Literature, October30, 2019, 002198941988123. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0021989419881233.
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This article examines two poems which deal directly with the events of the Zong massacre of 1781, which saw 132 Africans aboard the British slave ship Zong thrown overboard when the ship ran out of potable water. David Dabydeen’s “Turner” and Marlene NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! attempt to render the African experience of Zong in their work. Despite the similarities in subject matter and approach, there has been little substantial comparative work on these poems. Responding respectively to J. M. W. Turner’s painting The Slave Ship, which was inspired by the events, and art critic John Ruskin’s commentary on the work, as well as the legal case surrounding the massacre, Dabydeen and Philip write with the colonial past at the forefront of their minds. Using Ian Baucom’s theory of the synaptic sea, this article explores Dabydeen’s and Philip’s use of the sea as a space to remember and retell the massacre. Through its fluid and mutable nature, the sea becomes a counterpoint to the colonial record for both poets. It is both a creative and destructive space. Writing about this event is fraught with complexities for Dabydeen and Philip, but the sea emerges for both writers as a space which may accommodate the various pulls in their desire to redress the lack of African voices and depict the Zong massacre poetically.
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Mussari, Mark. "Umberto Eco Would Have Made a Bad Fauve." M/C Journal 5, no.3 (July1, 2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1966.
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"The eye altering, alters all." - Blake In his essay "How Culture Conditions the Colours We See," Umberto Eco claims that chromatic perception is determined by language. Regarding language as the primary modeling system, Eco argues for linguistic predominance over visual experience: ". . . the puzzle we are faced with is neither a psychological one nor an aesthetic one: it is a cultural one, and as such is filtered through a linguistic system" (159). Eco goes on to explain that he is 'very confused' about chromatic effect, and his arguments do a fine job of illustrating that confusion. To Eco's claim that color perception is determined by language, one can readily point out that both babies and animals, sans language, experience--and respond to--color perception. How then can color be only a cultural matter? Eco attempts to make a connection between the "negative concept" of a geopolitical unit (e.g., Holland or Italy defined by what is not Holland or Italy) and a chromatic system in which "units are defined not in themselves but in terms of opposition and position in relation to other units" (171). Culture, however, is not the only determinant in the opposition that defines certain colors: It is a physiological phenomenon that the eye, after staring at one color (for example, red) for a long time, will see that color's complement, its opposite (green), on a white background. Language is a frustrating tool when discussing color: languages throughout the world have only a limited number of words for the myriad color-sensations experienced by the average eye. Though language training and tradition have an undoubtedly profound effect on our color sense, our words for color constitute only one part of the color expression and not always the most important one. In his Remarks on Colour (1950-51), Wittgenstein observed: 'When we're asked 'What do the words 'red', 'blue', 'black', 'white' mean?' we can, of course, immediately point to things which have these colours,--but our ability to explain the meanings of these words goes no further!' (I-68). We can never say with complete certainly that what this writer meant by this color (we are already in trouble) is understood by this reader (the woods are now officially burning). A brief foray into the world of color perception discloses that, first and foremost, a physiological process, not a cultural one, takes place when a person sees colors. In his lively Art & Physics (1991), Leonard Shlain observes that "Color is the subjective perception in our brains of an objective feature of light's specific wavelengths. Each aspect is inseparable from the other" (170). In his 1898 play To Damascus I, August Strindberg indicated specifically in a stage direction that the Mourners and Pallbearers were to be dressed in brown, while allowing the characters to defy what the audience saw and claim that they were wearing black. In what may well be the first instance of such dramatic toying with an audience's perception, Strindberg forces us to ask where colors exist: In the subject's eye or in the perceived object? In no other feature of the world does such an interplay exist between subject and object. Shlain notes that color "is both a subjective opinion and an objective feature of the world and is both an energy and an entity" (171). In the science of imaging (the transfer of one color digital image from one technology to another) recent research has suggested that human vision may be the best model for this process. Human vision is spatial: it views colors also as sensations involving relationships within an entire image. This phenomenon is part of the process of seeing and unique to the way humans see. In some ways color terms illustrate Roland Barthes's arguments (in S/Z) that connotation actually precedes denotation in language--possibly even produces what we normally consider a word's denotation. Barthes refers to denotation as 'the last of connotations' (9). Look up 'red' in the American Heritage Dictionary and the first definition you find is a comparison to 'blood.' Blood carries with it (or the reader brings to it) a number of connotations that have long inspired a tradition of associating red with life, sex, energy, etc. Perhaps the closest objective denotation for red is the mention of 'the long wavelength end of the spectrum,' which basically tells us nothing about experiencing the color red. Instead, the connotations of red, many of them based on previous perceptual experience, constitute our first encounter with the word 'red.' I would not be so inclined to apply Barthes's connotational hierarchy when one sees red in, say, a painting--an experience in which some of the subjectivity one brings to a color is more limited by the actual physical appearance of the hue chosen by the artist. Also, though Barthes talks about linguistic associations, colors are more inclined to inspire emotional associations which sometimes cannot be expressed in language. As Gaston Bachelard wrote in Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement: 'The word blue designates, but it does not render' (162). Still, the 'pluralism' Barthes argues for in reading seems particularly present in the reader's encounter with color terms and their constant play of objectivity/subjectivity. In painting color was first released from the confines of form by the Post-Impressionists Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh, who allowed the color of the paint, the very marks on the canvas, to carry the power of expression. Following their lead, the French Fauve painters, under the auspices of Matisse, took the power of color another step further. Perhaps the greatest colorist of the twentieth century, Matisse understood that colors possess a harmony all their own--that colors call out for their complements; he used this knowledge to paint some of the most harmonious canvases in the history of art. 'I use the simplest colors,' Matisse wrote in 'The Path of Color' (1947). 'I don't transform them myself, it is the relationships that take care of that' (178). When he painted the Red Studio, for example, the real walls were actually a blue-gray; he later said that he 'felt red' in the room--and so he painted red (what he felt), leaving the observer to see red (what she feels). Other than its descriptive function, what does language have to do with any of this? It is a matter of perception and emotion. At a 1998 Seattle art gallery exhibit of predominantly monochromatic sculptures featuring icy white glass objects, I asked the artist why he had employed so little color in his work (there were two small pieces in colored glass and they were not as successful). He replied that "color has a tendency to get away from you," and so he had avoided it as much as possible. The fact that color has a power all its own, that the effects of chromaticism depend partially on how colors function beyond the associations applied to them, has long been acknowledged by more expressionistic artists. Writing to Emile Bernard in 1888, van Gogh proclaimed: 'I couldn't care less what the colors are in reality.' The pieces of the color puzzle which Umberto Eco wishes to dismiss, the psychological and the aesthetic, actually serve as the thrust of most pictorial and literary uses of color spaces. Toward the end of his essay, Eco bows to Klee, Mondrian, and Kandinsky (including even the poetry of Virgil) and their "artistic activity," which he views as working "against social codes and collective categorization" (175). Perhaps these artists and writers retrieved color from the deadening and sometimes restrictive effects of culture. Committed to the notion that the main function of color is expression, Matisse liberated color to abolish the sense of distance between the observer and the painting. His innovations are still baffling theorists: In Reconfiguring Modernism: Exploring the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature, Daniel R. Schwarz bemoans the difficulty in viewing Matisse's decorative productions in 'hermeneutical patterns' (149). Like Eco, Schwarz wants to replace perception and emotion with language and narrativity. Language may determine how we express the experience of color, but Eco places the cart before the horse if he actually believes that language 'determines' chromatic experience. Eco is not alone: the Cambridge linguist John Lyons, observing that color is 'not grammaticalised across the languages of the world as fully or centrally as shape, size, space, time' (223), concludes that colors are the product of language under the influence of culture. One is reminded of Goethe's remark that "the ox becomes furious if a red cloth is shown to him; but the philosopher, who speaks of color only in a general way, begins to rave" (xli). References Bachelard, Gaston. Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement. Dallas: The Dallas Institute Publications, 1988. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Eco, Umberto. 'How Culture Conditions the Colours We See.' On Signs. Ed. M. Blonsky. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. 157-75. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. The Theory of Colors. Trans. Charles Lock Eastlake. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1970. Lyons, John. 'Colour in Language.' Colour: Art & Science. Ed. Trevor Lamb and Janine Bourriau. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. 194-224. Matisse, Henri. Matisse on Art. Ed. Jack Flam. Rev. ed. Berkeley: University of California, 1995. Riley, Charles A., II. Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture, Literature, Music and Psychology. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1995. Schwarz, Daniel R. Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship between Modern Art and Modern Literature. New York: St. Martin's, 1997. Shlain, Leonard. Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light. New York: Morrow, 1991. Strindberg, August. To Damascus in Selected Plays. Volume 2: The Post-Inferno Period. Trans. Evert Sprinchorn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. 381-480. Van Gogh, Vincent. The Letters of Vincent van Gogh. Trans. Arnold Pomerans. London: Penguin, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Mussari, Mark. "Umberto Eco Would Have Made a Bad Fauve" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/eco.php>. Chicago Style Mussari, Mark, "Umberto Eco Would Have Made a Bad Fauve" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/eco.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Mussari, Mark. (2002) Umberto Eco Would Have Made a Bad Fauve. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/eco.php> ([your date of access]).
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Goggin, Joyce. "Transmedia Storyworlds, Literary Theory, Games." M/C Journal 21, no.1 (March14, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1373.
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IntroductionThis essay will focus on some of the connections between digitally transmitted stories, games, narrative processes, and the discipline whose ostensible job is the study of storytelling, namely literature. My observations will be limited to the specific case of computer games, storytelling, and what is often unproblematically referred to as “literature,” in order to focus attention on historical and contemporary features of the development of the relationship between the two that remain largely unexamined. Therefore, one goal of this essay is to re-think this relationship from a fresh perspective, whose “freshness” derives from reopening the past and re-examining what is overlooked when games scholars talk about “narrative” and “literature” as though they were interchangeable.Further, I will discuss the dissemination of narrative on/through various platforms before mass-media, such as textually transmitted stories that anticipate digitally disseminated narrative. This will include specific examples as well as a more general a re-examination of claims made on the topic of literature, narrative and computer games, via a brief review of disciplinary insights from the study of digital games and narrative. The following is therefore intended as a view of games and (literary) narrative in pre-digital forms as an attempt to build bridges between media studies and other disciplines by calling for a longer, developmental history of games, narrative and/or literature that considers them together rather than as separate territories.The Stakes of the Game My reasons for re-examining games and narrative scholarship include my desire to discuss a number of somewhat less-than-accurate or misleading notions about narrative and literature that have been folded into computer game studies, where these notions go unchallenged. I also want to point out a body of work on literature, mimesis and play that has been overlooked in game studies, and that would be helpful in thinking about stories and some of the (digital) platforms through which they are disseminated.To begin by responding to the tacit question of why it is worth asking what literary studies have to do with videogames, my answer resides in the link between play, games and storytelling forged by Aristotle in the Poetics. As a function of imitative play or “mimesis,” he claims, art forms mimic phenomena found in nature such as the singing of birds. So, by virtue of the playful mimetic function ascribed to the arts or “poesis,” games and storytelling are kindred forms of play. Moreover, the pretend function common to art forms such as realist fictional narratives that are read “as if” the story were true, and games played “as if” their premises were real, unfold in playfully imitative ways that produce possible worlds presented through different media.In the intervening centuries, numerous scholars discussed mimesis and play from Kant and Schiller in the 18th century, to Huizinga, and to many scholars who wrote on literature, mimesis and play later in the 20th century, such as Gadamer, Bell, Spariousu, Hutchinson, and Morrow. More recently, games scholar Janet Murray wrote that computer games are “a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest,” hence even Tetris acts as a dramatic “enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990’s” allowing them to “symbolically experience agency,” and “enact control over things outside our power” (142, 143). Similarly, Ryan has argued that videogames offer micro stories that are mostly about the pleasure of discovering nooks and crannies of on-line, digital possible worlds (10).At the same time, a tendency developed in games studies in the 1990s to eschew any connection with narrative, literature and earlier scholarship on mimesis. One example is Markku Eskelinen’s article in Game Studies wherein he argued that “[o]utside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Eskelinen then explains that “when games and especially computer games are studied and theorized they are almost without exception colonized from the fields of literary, theatre, drama and film studies.” As Eskelinen’s argument attests, his concern is disciplinary territorialisation rather than stories and their transmedial dissemination, whereas I prefer to take an historical approach to games and storytelling, to which I now direct my attention.Stepping Back Both mimesis and interactivity are central to how stories are told and travel across media. In light thereof, I recall the story of Zeuxis who, in the 5th century BC, introduced a realistic method of painting. As the story goes, Zeuxis painted a boy holding a bunch of grapes so realistically that it attracted birds who tried to enter the world of the painting, whereupon the artist remarked that, were the boy rendered as realistically as the grapes, he would have scared the birds away. Centuries later in the 1550s, the camera obscura and mirrors were used to project scenery as actors moved in and out of it as an early form of multimedia storytelling entertainment (Smith 22). In the late 17th century, van Mieris painted The Raree Show, representing an interactive travelling storyboard and story master who invited audience participation, hence the girl pictured here, leaning forward to interact with the story.Figure 1: The Raree Show (van Mieris)Numerous interactive narrative toys were produced in the 18th and 19th, such as these storytelling playing cards sold as a leaf in The Great Mirror of Folly (1720). Along with the plays, poems and cartoons also contained in this volume dedicated to the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720, the cards serve as a storyboard with plot lines that follow suits, so that hearts picks up one narrative thread, and clubs, spades and diamonds another. Hence while the cards could be removed for gaming they could also be read as a story in a medium that, to borrow games scholar Espen Aarseth’s terminology, requires non-trivial physical or “ergodic effort” on the part of readers and players.Figure 2: playing cards from The Great Mirror of Folly (1720) In the 20th century examples of interactive and ergodic codex fiction abound, including Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel [Glass Bead Game] (1943, 1949), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962), and Winterson’s PowerBook (2001) that conceptually and/or physically mimic and anticipate hypertext. More recently, Chloé Delaume’s Corpus Simsi (2003) explicitly attempts to remediate a MMORPG as the title suggests, just as there are videogames that attempt, in various ways, to remediate novels. I have presented these examples to argue for a long-continuum view of storytelling and games, as a series of attempts to produce stories—from Zeuxis grapes to PowerBook and beyond—that can be entered and interacted with, at least metaphorically or cognitively. Over time, various game-like or playful interfaces from text to computer have invited us into storyworlds while partially impeding or opening the door to interaction and texturing our experience of the story in medium-specific ways.The desire to make stories interactive has developed across media, from image to text and various combinations thereof, as a means of externalizing an author’s imagination to be activated by opening and reading a novel, or by playing a game wherein the story is mediated through a screen while players interact to change the course of the story. While I am arguing that storytelling has for centuries striven to interpolate spectators or readers by various means and though numerous media that would eventually make storytelling thoroughly and not only metaphorically interactive, I want now to return briefly to the question of literature.Narrative vs LiteratureThe term “literature” is frequently assumed to be unambiguous when it enters discussions of transmedia storytelling and videogames. What literature “is” was, however, hotly debated in the 1980s-90s with many scholars concluding that literature is a construct invented by “old dead white men,” resulting in much criticism on the topic of canon formation. Yet, without rehearsing the arguments produced in previous decades on the topic of literariness, I want to provide a few examples of what happens when games scholars and practitioners assume they know what literature is and then absorb or eschew it in their own transmedia storytelling endeavours.The 1990s saw the emergence of game studies as a young discipline, eager to burst out of the crucible of English Departments that were, as Eskelinen pointed out, the earliest testing grounds for the legitimized study of games. Thus ensued the “ludology vs narratology” debate wherein “ludologists,” keen to move away from literary studies, insisted that games be studied as games only, and participated in what Gonzalo Frasca famously called the “debate that never happened.” Yet as short-lived as the debate may have been, a negative and limited view of literature still inheres in games studies along with an abiding lack of awareness of the shared origins of stories, games, and thinking about both that I have attempted to sketch out thus far.Exemplary of arguments on the side of “ludology,” was storytelling game designer Chris Crawford’s keynote at Mediaterra 2007, in which he explained that literariness is measured by degrees of fun. Hence, whereas literature is highly formulaic and structured, storytelling is unconstrained and fun because storytellers have no rigid blueprint and can change direction at any moment. Yet, Crawford went on to explain how his storytelling machine works by drawing together individual syntactic elements, oddly echoing the Russian formalists’ description of literature, and particularly models that locate literary production at the intersection of the axis of selection, containing linguistic elements such as verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on, and the axis of combination governed by rules of genre.I foreground Crawford’s ludological argument because it highlights some of the issues that arise when one doesn’t care to know much about the study of literature. Crawford understands literature as rule-based, rigid and non-fun, and then trots out his own storytelling-model based or rigid syntactical building blocks and rule-based laws of combination, without the understanding the irony. This returns me to ludologist Eskelinen who also argued that “stories are just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to games”. In either case, the matter of “story” is stretched over the rigid syntax of language, and the literary structuralist enterprise has consisted precisely in peeling back that narrative skin or “gift wrap” to reveal the bones of human cognitive thought processes, as for example, when we read rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy. In the words of William Carlos Williams, poetry is a machine made out of words, from whose nuts and bolts meaning emerges when activated, similar to programing language in a videogame whose story is eminent and comes into being as we play.Finally, the question of genre hangs in the background given that “literature” itself is potentially transmedia because its content can take many forms and be transmitted across diverse platforms. Importantly in this regard the novel, which is the form most games scholars have in mind when drawing or rejecting connections between games and literature, is itself a shape-shifting, difficult-to-define genre whose form, as the term novel implies, is subject to the constant imperative to innovate across media as it has done over time.Different Approaches While I just highlighted inadequacies in some of the scholarship on games and narrative (or “literature” when narrative is defined as such) there is work on interactive storytelling and the transmedia dissemination of stories explicitly as games that deals with some of these issues. In their article on virtual bodies in Dante’s Inferno (2010), Welsh and Sebastian explain that the game is a “reboot of a Trecento poem,” and discuss what must have been Dante’s own struggle in the 14th century to “materialize sin through metaphors of suffering,” while contending “with the abstractness of the subject matter [as well as] the representational shortcomings of language itself,” concluding that Dante’s “corporeal allegories must become interactive objects constructed of light and math that feel to the user like they have heft and volume” (166). This notion of “corporeal allegories” accords with my own model of a “body hermeneutic” that could help to understand the reception of stories transmitted in non-codex media: a poetics of reading that includes how game narratives “engage the body hapitically” (Goggin 219).Likewise, Kathi Berens’s work on “Novel Games: Playable Books on iPad” is exemplary of what literary theory and game texts can do for each other, that is, through the ways in which games can remediate, imitate or simply embody the kind of meditative depth that we encounter in the expansive literary narratives of the 19th century. In her reading of Living Will, Berens argues that the best way to gauge meaning is not in the potentialities of its text, but rather “in the human performance of reading and gaming in new thresholds of egodicity,” and offers a close reading that uncovers the story hidden in the JavaScript code, and which potentially changes the meaning of the game. Here again, the argument runs parallel to my own call for readings that take into account the visceral experience of games, and which demands a configurative/interpretative approach to the unfolding of narrative and its impact on our being as a whole. Such an approach would destabilize the old mind/body split and account for various modes of sensation as part of the story itself. This is where literary theory, storytelling, and games may be seen as coming together in novels like Delaume’s Corpus Simsi and a host of others that in some way remediate video games. Such analyses would include features of the platform/text—shape, topography, ergodicity—and how the story is disseminated through the printed text, the authors’ websites, blogs and so on.It is likewise important to examine what literary criticism that has dealt with games and storytelling in the past can do for games. For example, if one agrees with Wittgenstein that language is inherently game-like or ludic and that, by virtue of literature’s long association with mimesis, its “as if” function, and its “autotelic” or supposedly non-expository nature, then most fiction is itself a form of game. Andrew Ferguson’s work on Finnegan’s Wake (1939) takes these considerations into account while moving games and literary studies into the digital age. Ferguson argues that Finnegan’s Wake prefigures much of what computers make possible such as glitching, which “foregrounds the gaps in the code that produces the video-game environment.” This he argues, is an operation that Joyce performed textually, thereby “radically destabilizing” his own work, “leading to effects [similar to] short-circuiting plot events, and entering spaces where a game’s normal ontological conditions are suspended.” As Ferguson points out, moreover, literary criticism resembles glitch hunting as scholars look for keys to unlock the puzzles that constitute the text through which readers must level up.Conclusion My intention has been to highlight arguments presented by ludologists like Eskelinnen who want to keep game studies separate from narrative and literary studies, as well as those game scholars who favour a narrative approach like Murray and Ryan, in order to suggest ways in which a longer, historical view of how stories travel across platforms might offer a more holistic view of where we are at today. Moreover, as my final examples of games scholarship suggest, games, and games that specifically remediate works of literature such as Dante’s Inferno, constitute a rapidly moving target that demands that we keep up by finding new ways to take narrative and ergodic complexity into account.The point of this essay was not, therefore, to adapt a position in any one camp but rather to nod to the major contributors in a debate which was largely about institutional turf, and perhaps never really happened, yet still continues to inform scholarship. At the same time, I wanted to argue for the value of discussing the long tradition of understanding literature as a form of mimesis and therefore as a particular kind of game, and to show how such an understanding contributes to historically situating and analysing videogames. Stories can be experienced across multiple platforms or formats, and my ultimate goal is to see what literary studies can do for game studies by trying to show that the two share more of the same goals, elements, and characteristics than is commonly supposed.ReferencesAristotle. Poetics, Trans. J. Hutton. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.Behrens, Kathi. “‘Messy’ Ludology: New Dimensions of Narrator Unreliability in Living Will.” No Trivial Effort: Essays on Games and Literary Theory. Eds. Joyce Goggin and Timothy Welsh. Bloomsbury: Forthcoming.Bell, D. Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1993. Delaume, Chloé. Corpus Simsi. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003.Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation”. Game Studies 1.1 (2011). <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/>. Ferguson, Andrew. “Let’s Play Finnegan’s Wake.” Hypermedia Joyce Studies 13 (2014). <http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v13_1/main/essays.php?essay=ferguson>. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, Trans. Barden and Cumming. New York: Crossroad, 1985.Goggin, Joyce. “A Body Hermeneutic?: Corpus Simsi or Reading like a Sim.” The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory. Eds. G.F. Mitrano and Eric Jarosinski. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. 205-223.Hesse, Hermann. The Glass Bead Game [Das Glasperlenspiel]. Trans. Clara Winston. London: Picador, 2002.Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff cop, 1938.Hutchinson, Peter. Games Authors Play. New York: Metheun, 1985.James, Joyce. Finnegan’s Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939.Morrow, Nancy. Dreadful Games: The Play of Desire and the 19th-Century Novel. Ohio: Kent State UP, 1988.Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1997.Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Saporta, Marc. Composition No. 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962.Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.Spariosu, Mihai. Literature, Mimesis and Play. Tübigen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1982.Winterson, Janette. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan: 1972.
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Gibson, Prue. "Body of Art and Love." M/C Journal 15, no.4 (August2, 2012). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.474.
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The phenomenological experience of art is one of embodied awareness. Now more than ever, as contemporary art becomes more interactive and immersive, our perceptions of embodiment are useful tools to gauge the efficacy of visual art as a stimulus for knowledge, new experience and expression. Art has a mimetic and interactive relationship with the world. As Schopenhauer said, “The world is my representation” (3). So which takes effect first: the lungful of excited breath or the synapses, is it the miasmic smell of dust on whirring video projectors or the emotion? When we see great art (in this instance, new media work), do we shudder, then see and understand it? Or do we see, tremble and, only then, know? “Art unleashes and intensifies...Art is of the animal” (Grosz, Chaos 62-3). Are our bodies reacting in response to the physical information at hand in the world? “Why do you like Amy?” I asked my six year old son, who was in love at the time. “I like her face,” he said. Was this a crude description of infantile love or an intuitive understanding of how all kinds of passion begin with the surface of the face? Peter Sloterdijk writes about the immersion and mimicry, the life and death mutualism of faces, of gazing on another’s face. He says, “Both of these, self-knowledge as well as self-completion, are operations in a sphere of illusory bipolarity that, like an ellipse, only formally possess two focal points” (205). It seems to me that this desire for the love, beauty and knowledge of another is mutual; a reciprocal narrative thrust, the same existential motivation. Elizabeth Grosz writes about the first emotions of the newborn child and the immediate expressiveness of the face, with those of the parents. She refers to Alphonso Lingis to develop this connection between emotion and bodily expression as: “the pleasure and pains the body comes to articulate: human infants laugh and weep before they can speak.” (Grosz, Chaos 51) To be acknowledged, to see a reflection of one’s own face in that of another’s face as an expression of love, is a craving common to all humans.Art, like new love, has the ability to set our hearts aflutter, lips aquiver, our palms turned upwards in awe, our eyes widened in surprise. “The reverie of love defies all attempts to record it” (Stendhal 63). We are physically drawn to great works, to their immediacy, to their sudden emerging determination and tangibility (Menke). Our perceptions are entangled, our attitudes are affected, our imaginations are piqued and our knowledge and memory are probed.So what happens next? Once our hearts are pounding and our legs are wobbling, then what? As our unconscious experience becomes conscious (as the result of our brain letting our body know and then identifying and analysing the data), we start to draw associations and allow the mind and the body to engage with the world. The significance of what we see, an art object worthy of love for instance, is interpreted or distinguished by our memory and our personal accumulation of information over our lives. When we are away from the object, we perceive the art work to be dispassionate, inanimate and impassive. Yet standing before the object, our perception shifts and we consider the art work to be alive and dynamic. I believe the ability to ‘fall’ for an art work reflects the viewer’s heart-breaking longing to ensnare the beauty (or ugliness) that has so captured his or her soul. Like the doppelganger who doesn’t recognise its own double, its own shadow, the viewer falls in love (Poe 1365). This perverse perception of love (perverse because we usually associate love as existing between humans) is real. Philosopher Paul Crowther writes about the phenomenology of visual art. Where I am talking about a romantic longing, a love of the love itself, the face falling for the face, the body falling for the body, bodily, Crowther breaks down the physical patterns of perceiving art. Though he does not deny the corporeal reality of the experience, he talks of the body operations discriminating at the level of perception, drawing on memories and future expectations and desire (Crowther, Phenomenology 62). Crowther says, “Through the painting, the virtual and the physical, the world and the body, are shown to inhabit one another simultaneously and inseparably” (Phenomenology 75). I am not sure that these experiences occur simultaneously or even in tandem. While we perceive the experience as full and complex and potentially revelatory, one element more likely informs the next and so on, but in a nanosecond of time. The bodily senses warn the heart which warns the mind. The mind activates the memories and experiences before alerting us to the world and the context and finally, the aesthetic judgement.Crowther’s perception of transcendence operates when reality is suspended in the mode of possibility. This informs my view that love of art functions as an impossibility of desire’s end, gratification must be pushed back every time. What of Crowther’s corporeal imagination? This is curious: how can we imagine with our bodies (as opposed to our mind and spirit)? This idea is virtual, in time and space outside those we are used to. This is an imagination that engages instantly, in a self-conscious way. Crowther refers to the virtually immobilised subject matter and the stationary observer and calls it a “suspension of tense” (Phenomenology 69). However I am interested in the movement of the spectator around the art work or in synchronicity with the artwork too. This continues the face to face, body to body, encounter of art.Crowther also writes of phenomenological depth as a condition of embodiment which is of significance to judgement; phenomenological depth is “shown through ways in which the creation of visual artworks embodies complex relations between the human subject and its objects of perception, knowledge, and action” (Phenomenology 9). Although Crowther is leaning on the making of the artwork more heavily than the viewers’ perception of it in this account, it relates well to the Australian artists and twins Silvana and Gabriella Mangano, whose action performances, presented in three-screened, large-scale video were represented in the 2012 Sydney Biennale. The Mangano twins collaborate on video performance works which focus on their embodied interpretations of the act of drawing. In the Mangano sisters’ 2001 Drawing 1, the twins stand beside a wall of paper, facing each other. While maintaining eye contact, they draw the same image on the wall, without seeing what mark they are making or what mark the other is making. This intuitive, physical, corporeal manifestation of their close connection becomes articulated on paper. Its uncanny nature, the shared creativity and the performative act of collaborative drawing is riveting. The spectator is both excluded and incorporated in this work. Such intimacy between siblings is exclusive and yet the participation of the spectator is necessary, as witnesses to this inexplicable ability to know where the other’s drawing will move next. The sisters are face to face but the spectator and the artwork also function in a face to face encounter; the rhythmic fluidity of movement on the video screen surface is the face of the artwork.When experiencing the Mangano works, we become aware of our own subjective physical experiences. Also, we are aware of the artists’ consciousness of their heightened physical relations with each other, while making the work. I am writing in an era of digital video and performance art, where sound, movement, space and shifts of temporality must be added to more traditional formalist criteria such as form, surface, line and colour. As such, our criteria for judgement of this new surge of highly technical (though often intuitively derived) work and the immersive, sometimes interactive, experiences of the audience have to change at the same pace. One of the best methods of aesthetic critique to use is the concept of embodiment, the perceptual forces at work when we are conscious of the experience of art. As I sit at my desk, I am vaguely aware of my fingers rattling across the keyboard and of my legs crossed beneath me. I am conscious of their function, as an occupied space within which my consciousness resides. “I know where each of my limbs is through a body image in which all are included. But the notion of body image is ambiguous,” (102) says Merleau-Ponty, and this is a “Continual translation into visual language of the kinaesthetic and articular impressions of the moment” (102). Mark Johnson reiterates this dilemma: “We are aware of what we see, but not of our seeing.” (5) This doesn’t only relate to the movement of the Mangano twins’ muscles, postures and joint positions in their videos. It also relates to the spectator’s posture and straining, our recoiling and absorption. If I lurch forward (Lingis 174) to see the video image of the twins as they walk across a plain in El Bruc, Spain, using Thonet wooden chairs as stilts in their 2009 work The Surround, and if my eyes widen, if my hands unclench and open, and if I touch my cheek in wonder, then, is this embodied reaction a legitimate normative response? Is this perception of the work, as a beautiful and desirable experience, an admissible form of judgement? If I feel moved, if my heart races, my skin prickles, does that mean the effect is as important as other technical, conceptual or formalist categories of success? Does this feeling refer to the possibility of new intelligence? An active body in a bodily space (Merleau-Ponty 104) as opposed to external space can be perceived because of darkness needed for the ‘theatre’ of the performance. Darkness is often the cue for audiences that there is performative information at work. In the Manganos’ videos in Spain (they completed several videos during a residency in El Bruc Spain), the darkness was the isolated and alienating landscape of a remote plain. In their 2010 work Neon, which was inspired by Atsuko Tanaka’s 1957 Electric Dress, the movement and flourish of coloured neon paper was filmed against a darkened background, which is the kind of theatre space Merleau-Ponty describes: the performative cue. In Neon the checkered and brightly coloured paper appeared waxy as the sisters moved it around their half-hidden bodies, as though blown by an imaginary wind. This is an example of how the black or darkened setting works as a stimulant for understanding the importance of the body at work within the dramatic space. This also escalates the performative nature of the experience, which in turn informs the spectator’s active reaction. Merleau-Ponty says, “the laying down of the first co-ordinates, the anchoring of the active body in an object, the situation of the body in the face of its tasks. Bodily space can be distinguished from external space and envelop its parts instead of spreading them out” (115) The viewer, however, is not disembodied, despite the occasional sensation of hallucination in the face of an artwork. The body is present, it is in, near, around and sometimes below the stimulus. Many art experiences are immersive, such as Mexican, Rafael Lorenzo Hemmer, and Dane, Olafur Eliasson, whose installations explore time, light and sound and require audience participation. The participant’s interaction causes an effect upon the artwork. We are more conscious of ourselves in these museum environments: we move slowly, we revolve and pause, with hands on hip, head cocked to the side. We smile, frown, sense, squint, laugh, listen and touch. Traditional art (such as painting) may not invite such extremes of sensory multiplicity, such extremes of mimicking movement and intimate immersion. “The fact that the self exists in such an horizon of past and possible experiences means that it can never know itself sufficiently as just this immediately given physical body. It inhabits that body in the sense of being able, as it were, to wander introspectively through memory and imagination to places, times and situations other than those of its present embodiment” (Crowther, Phenomenology 178). Crowther’s point is important in application to the discussion of embodiment as a normative criteria of aesthetic judgement. It is not just our embodied experience that we bring to the magistrate’s court room, for judgement, but our memory and knowledge and the context or environment of both our experience and the experience that is enacted in relation to the art work. So an argument for embodiment as a criteria for normative judgements would not function alone, but as an adjunct, an add-on, an addition to the list of already applied criteria. This approach of open honesty and sincerity to art is similar to the hopefulness of new love. This is not the sexualised perception, the tensions of eroticism, which Alphonso Lingis speaks of in his Beauty and Lust essay. I am not talking about how “the pattern of holes and orifices we sense in the other pulls at the layout of lips, fingers, breasts, thighs and genitals” nor “the violent emotions that sense the obscenity in anguish” (175-76), I am instead referring to a G-rated sense of attachment, a more romantic attitude of compassion, desire, empathy and affection. Those movements made by the Mangano twins in their videos, in slow motion, sometimes in reverse, in black and white, the actions and postures that flow and dance, peak and drop, swirl and fall: the play of beauty within space, remind me of other languorous mimetic accents taken from nature. I recall the rhythms of poetry I have read, the repetitions of rituals and patterns of behaviour in nature I have witnessed. This knowledge, experience, memory and awareness all contribute to the map of love which is directing me to different points in the performance. These contributors to my embodied experience are creating a new whole and also a new format for judgement. Elizabeth Grosz talks about body maps when she says, “the body is thus also a site of resistance...for it is capable of being self-marked, self-represented in alternative ways” (Inscriptions and Body Maps 64). I’m interested less in the marking and more in the idea of the power of bodily participation. This is power in terms of the personal and the social as transformative qualities. “Art reminds us of states of animal vigour,” Nietsche says (Grosz, Chaos 63). Elizabeth Grosz continues this idea by saying that sensations are composites (75) and that art is connected to sexual energies and impulses, to a common impulse for more (63). However I think there is a mistake in attributing sexuality, as prescribed by Lingis and Grosz, despite my awe and admiration for them both, to the impulses of art. They might seem or appear to be erotic or sexual urges but are they not something a little more fleeting, more abstract, more insouciant? These are the desires at close hand but it is what those desires really represent that count. Philosopher John Armstrong refers to a Vuillard painting in the Courtauld Institute: “This beautiful image reminds us that sexuality isn’t just about sex; it conveys a sense of trust and comfort which are connected to tender touch” (Armstrong 135). In other words, if we assume there is a transference of Freudian sexual intensity or libido to the art work, perhaps it is not the act of sex we crave but a more elaborate desire, a desire for old-fashioned love, respect and honour.Sue Best refers to the word communion to describe the rapturous transport of being close to the artwork but always kept at a certain distance (512). This relates to the condition of love, of desiring an object but never attaining it. This is arrested pleasure, otherwise known as torture. But the word communion also gives rise, for me, to an idea of religious communion, of drinking the wine and bread as metaphor for Christ’s blood and body. This concept of embodied virtue or pious love, of becoming one with the Lord has repetitions or parallels with the experience of art. The urge to consume, intermingle or become physically entangled with the object of our desire is more than a philosophical urge but a spiritual urge. It seems to me that embodiment is not just the physical realities and percepts of experience but that they stand, mnemonically and mimetically, for more abstract urges and desires, hopes and ambitions, outside the realm of the gallery space, the video space or the bodily space. Crowther says, “Art answers this psychological/ontological need. ...through the complex and ubiquitous ways in which it engages the imagination” (Defining Art 238). While our embodied or perceptual experiences might seem slight or of less importance at first, they gather weight when added to knowledge and desire. Bergson said, “But there is, in this necessary poverty of our conscious perception, something that is positive, that foretells spirit: it is in the etymological sense of the word, discernment” (31). This art love is an aspiration for more, for hopes and expectation that the art work I fall for will enlighten me, will enrich my experience. This art work reminds me of all the qualities and principles I crave, but know in my heart are just beyond my fingertips. Perhaps we can consider the acknowledgement of art love as, not only a means of discernment but also as a legitimate purpose, that is, to be bodily, emotionally and intellectually changed and to gain further knowledge.ReferencesArmstrong, John. Conditions of Love. London: Penguin, 2002.Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. New York: Dover Philosophical Classics, 2004.Best, Sue. “Rethinking Visual Pleasure: Aesthetics and Affect.” Theory and Psychology 17 (2007): 4.Crowther, Paul. The Phenomenology of Visual Art. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.---. Defining Art: Creating the Canon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007.Menke, Christoph, Daniel Birnbaum, Isabell Graw and Daniel Loick. The Power of Judgement: A Debate on Aesthetic Critique. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010.Grosz, Elizabeth. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.---. “Inscriptions and Body-Maps: Representations and the Corporeal.” Feminine/Masculine and Representation. Eds. Terry Threadgold and Anne Granny-France. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1990. 62-74. Johnson, Mark. The Meaning of the Body. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007.Lingis, Alphonso. “Beauty and Lust.” Journal of Phenomenological Pyschology 27 (1996): 174-192.Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. New York: Routledge Classics, 2002.Poe, Edgar Allen. “William Wilson: A Tale.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: Nortin, 1985.Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. New York: Dover, 1969.Sloterdijk, Peter. Bubbles, Spheres 1. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011.Stendhal. Love. London: Penguin, 2004.
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Coull, Kim. "Secret Fatalities and Liminalities: Translating the Pre-Verbal Trauma and Cellular Memory of Late Discovery Adoptee Illegitimacy." M/C Journal 17, no.5 (October26, 2014). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.892.
Full textAbstract:
I was born illegitimate. Born on an existential precipice. My unwed mother was 36 years old when she relinquished me. I was the fourth baby she was required to give away. After I emerged blood stained and blue tinged – abject, liminal – not only did the nurses refuse me my mother’s touch, I also lost the sound of her voice. Her smell. Her heart beat. Her taste. Her gaze. The silence was multi-sensory. When they told her I was dead, I also lost, within her memory and imagination, my life. I was adopted soon after but not told for over four decades. It was too shameful for even me to know. Imprinted at birth with a psychological ‘death’, I fell, as a Late Discovery Adoptee (LDA), into a socio-cultural and psychological abyss, frozen at birth at the bottom of a parturitive void from where, invisible within family, society, and self I was unable to form an undamaged sense of being.Throughout the 20th century (and for centuries before) this kind of ‘social abortion’ was the dominant script. An adoptee was regarded as a bastard, born of sin, the mother blamed, the father exonerated, and silence demanded (Lynch 28-74). My adoptive mother also sinned. She was infertile. But, in taking me on, she assumed the role of a womb worthy woman, good wife, and, in her case, reluctant mother (she secretly didn’t want children and was privately overwhelmed by the task). In this way, my mother, my adoptive mother, and myself are all the daughters of bereavement, all of us sacrificed on the altar of prejudice and fear that infertility, sex outside of marriage, and illegitimacy were unspeakable crimes for which a price must be paid and against which redemptive protection must be arranged. If, as Thomas Keneally (5) writes, “original sin is the mother fluid of history” then perhaps all three of us all lie in its abject waters. Grotevant, Dunbar, Kohler and Lash Esau (379) point out that adoption was used to ‘shield’ children from their illegitimacy, women from their ‘sexual indiscretions’, and adoptive parents from their infertility in the belief that “severing ties with birth family members would promote attachment between adopted children and parents”. For the adoptee in the closed record system, the socio/political/economic vortex that orchestrated their illegitimacy is born out of a deeply, self incriminating primal fear that reaches right back into the recesses of survival – the act of procreation is infested with easily transgressed life and death taboos within the ‘troop’ that require silence and the burial of many bodies (see Amanda Gardiner’s “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia” for a palpable, moving, and comprehensive exposition on the links between 'illegitimacy', the unmarried mother and child murder). As Nancy Verrier (24) states in Coming Home to Self, “what has to be understood is that separation trauma is an insidious experience, because, as a society, we fail to see this experience as a trauma”. Indeed, relinquishment/adoption for the baby and subsequent adult can be acutely and chronically painful. While I was never told the truth of my origins, of course, my body knew. It had been there. Sentient, aware, sane, sensually, organically articulate, it messaged me (and anyone who may have been interested) over the decades via the language of trauma, its lexicon and grammar cellular, hormonal, muscular (Howard & Crandall, 1-17; Pert, 72), the truth of my birth, of who I was an “unthought known” (Bollas 4). I have lived out my secret fatality in a miasmic nebula of what I know now to be the sequelae of adoption psychopathology: nausea, physical and psychological pain, agoraphobia, panic attacks, shame, internalised anger, depression, self-harm, genetic bewilderment, and generalised anxiety (Brodzinsky 25-47; Brodzinsky, Smith, & Brodzinsky 74; Kenny, Higgins, Soloff, & Sweid xiv; Levy-Shiff 97-98; Lifton 210-212; Verrier The Primal Wound 42-44; Wierzbicki 447-451) – including an all pervading sense of unreality experienced as dissociation (the experience of depersonalisation – where the self feels unreal – and derealisation – where the world feels unreal), disembodiment, and existential elision – all characteristics of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In these ways, my body intervened, acted out, groaned in answer to the social overlay, and from beyond “the dermal veil” tried to procure access, as Vicky Kirby (77) writes, to “the body’s opaque ocean depths” through its illnesses, its eloquent, and incessantly aching and silent verbosities deepened and made impossibly fraught because I was not told. The aim of this paper is to discuss one aspect of how my body tried to channel the trauma of my secret fatality and liminality: my pre-disclosure art work (the cellular memory of my trauma also expressed itself, pre-disclosure, through my writings – poetry, journal entries – and also through post-coital glossolalia, all discussed at length in my Honours research “Womb Tongues” and my Doctoral Dissertation “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Pre-verbal Late Discovery Adoption Trauma into Narrative”). From the age of thirty onwards I spent twelve years in therapy where the cause of my childhood and adult psychopathology remained a mystery. During this time, my embodied grief and memories found their way into my art work, a series of 5’ x 3’ acrylic paintings, some of which I offer now for discussion (figures 1-4). These paintings map and express what my body knew but could not verbalise (without language to express my grief, my body found other ways to vent). They are symptom and sign of my pre-verbal adoption trauma, evidence that my body ‘knew’ and laboured ceaselessly and silently to find creative ways to express the incarcerated trauma. Post disclosure, I have used my paintings as artefacts to inform, underpin, and nourish the writing of a collection of poetry “Womb Tongues” and a literary novel/memoir “The Womb Artist” (TWA) in an ongoing autoethnographical, performative, and critical inquiry. My practice-led research as a now conscious and creative witness, fashions the recontextualisation of my ‘self’ into my ‘self’ and society, this time with cognisant and reparative knowledge and facilitates the translation of my body’s psychopathology and memory (explicit and implicit) into a healing testimony that explores the traumatised body as text and politicizes the issues surrounding LDAs (Riley 205). If I use these paintings as a memoirist, I use them second hand, after the fact, after they have served their initial purpose, as the tangible art works of a baby buried beneath a culture’s prejudice, shame, and judgement and the personal cries from the illegitimate body/self. I use them now to explore and explain my subclinical and subterranean life as a LDA.My pre-disclosure paintings (Figures 1-4) – filled with vaginal, fetal, uterine, and umbilical references – provide some kind of ‘evidence’ that my body knew what had happened to me as if, with the tenacity of a poltergeist, my ‘spectral self’ found ways to communicate. Not simply clues, but the body’s translation of the intra-psychic landscape, a pictorial and artistic séance into the world, as if my amygdala – as quasar and signal, homing device and history lesson (a measure, container, and memoir) – knew how to paint a snap shot or an x-ray of the psyche, of my cellular marrow memories (a term formulated from fellow LDA Sandy McCutcheon’s (76) memoir, The Magician’s Son when he says, “What I really wanted was the history of my marrow”). If, as Salveet Talwar suggests, “trauma is processed from the body up”, then for the LDA pre-discovery, non-verbal somatic signage is one’s ‘mother tongue’(25). Talwar writes, “non-verbal expressive therapies such as art, dance, music, poetry and drama all activate the sub-cortical regions of the brain and access pre-verbal memories” (26). In these paintings, eerily divinatory and pointed traumatic, memories are made visible and access, as Gussie Klorer (213) explains in regard to brain function and art therapy, the limbic (emotional) system and the prefrontal cortex in sensorimotor integration. In this way, as Marie Angel and Anna Gibbs (168) suggest, “the visual image may serve as a kind of transitional mode in thought”. Ruth Skilbeck in her paper First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angled Lens, also discusses (with reference to her photographic record and artistic expression of her mother’s death) what she calls the “dark matter” – what has been overlooked, “left out”, and/or is inexplicable (55) – and the idea of art work as the “transitional object” as “a means that some artists use, conceptually and yet also viscerally, in response to the extreme ‘separation anxiety’ of losing a loved one, to the void of the Unknown” (57). In my case, non-disclosure prevented my literacy and the evolution of the image into language, prevented me from fully understanding the coded messages left for me in my art work. However, each of my paintings is now, with the benefit of full disclosure, a powerful, penetrating, and comprehensible intra and extra sensory cry from the body in kinaesthetic translation (Lusebrink, 125; Klorer, 217). In Figure 1, ‘Embrace’, the reference to the umbilical is palpable, described in my novel “The Womb Artist” (184) this way; “two ropes tightly entwine as one, like a dark and dirty umbilical cord snaking its way across a nether world of smudged umbers”. There is an ‘abject’ void surrounding it. The cord sapped of its colour, its blood, nutrients – the baby starved of oxygen, breath; the LDA starved of words and conscious understanding. It has two parts entwined that may be seen in many ways (without wanting to reduce these to static binaries): mother/baby; conscious/unconscious; first person/third person; child/adult; semiotic/symbolic – numerous dualities could be spun from this embrace – but in terms of my novel and of the adoptive experience, it reeks of need, life and death, a text choking on the poetic while at the same time nourished by it; a text made ‘available’ to the reader while at the same narrowing, limiting, and obscuring the indefinable nature of pre-verbal trauma. Figure 1. Embrace. 1993. Acrylic on canvas.The painting ‘Womb Tongues’ (Figure 2) is perhaps the last (and, obviously, lasting) memory of the infinite inchoate universe within the womb, the umbilical this time wrapped around in a phallic/clitorial embrace as the baby-self emerges into the constrictions of a Foucauldian world, where the adoptive script smothers the ‘body’ encased beneath the ‘coils’ of Judeo-Christian prejudice and centuries old taboo. In this way, the reassigned adoptee is an acute example of power (authority) controlling and defining the self and what knowledge of the self may be allowed. The baby in this painting is now a suffocated clitoris, a bound subject, a phallic representation, a gagged ‘tongue’ in the shape of the personally absent (but socially imposing) omni-present and punitive patriarchy. Figure 2. Womb Tongues. 1997. Acrylic on canvas.‘Germination’ (Figure 3) depicts an umbilical again, but this time as emerging from a seething underworld and is present in TWA (174) this way, “a colony of night crawlers that writhe and slither on the canvas, moving as one, dozens of them as thin as a finger, as long as a dream”. The rhizomic nature of this painting (and Figure 4), becomes a heaving horde of psychosomatic and psychopathological influences and experiences, a multitude of closely packed, intense, and dendridic compulsions and symptoms, a mass of interconnected (and by nature of the silence and lie) subterranean knowledges that force the germination of a ‘ghost baby/child/adult’ indicated by the pale and ashen seedling that emerges above ground. The umbilical is ghosted, pale and devoid of life. It is in the air now, reaching up, as if in germination to a psychological photosynthesis. There is the knot and swarm within the unconscious; something has, in true alien fashion, been incubated and is now emerging. In some ways, these paintings are hardly cryptic.Figure 3. Germination.1993. Acrylic on canvas.In Figure 4 ‘The Birthing Tree’, the overt symbolism reaches ‘clairvoyant status’. This could be read as the family ‘tree’ with its four faces screaming out of the ‘branches’. Do these represent the four babies relinquished by our mother (the larger of these ‘beings’ as myself, giving birth to the illegitimate, silenced, and abject self)? Are we all depicted in anguish and as wraithlike, grotesquely simplified into pure affect? This illegitimate self is painted as gestating a ‘blue’ baby, near full-term in a meld of tree and ‘self’, a blue umbilical cord, again, devoid of blood, ghosted, lifeless and yet still living, once again suffocated by the representation of the umbilical in the ‘bowels’ of the self, the abject part of the body, where refuse is stored and eliminated: The duodenum of the damned. The Devil may be seen as Christopher Bollas’s “shadow of the object”, or the Jungian archetypal shadow, not simply a Judeo-Christian fear-based spectre and curmudgeon, but a site of unprocessed and, therefore, feared psychological material, material that must be brought to consciousness and integrated. Perhaps the Devil also is the antithesis to ‘God’ as mother. The hell of ‘not mother’, no mother, not the right mother, the reluctant adoptive mother – the Devil as icon for the rich underbelly of the psyche and apophatic to the adopted/artificial/socially scripted self.Figure 4. The Birthing Tree. 1995. Acrylic on canvas.These paintings ache with the trauma of my relinquishment and LDA experience. They ache with my body’s truth, where the cellular and psychological, flesh and blood and feeling, leak from my wounds in unspeakable confluence (the two genital lips as the site of relinquishment, my speaking lips that have been sealed through non-disclosure and shame, the psychological trauma as Verrier’s ‘primal wound’) just as I leaked from my mother (and society) at birth, as blood and muck, and ooze and pus and death (Grosz 195) only to be quickly and silently mopped up and cleansed through adoption and life-long secrecy. Where I, as translator, fluent in both silence and signs, disclose the baby’s trauma, asking for legitimacy. My experience as a LDA sets up an interesting experiment, one that allows an examination of the pre-verbal/pre-disclosure body as a fleshed and breathing Rosetta Stone, as an interface between the language of the body and of the verbalised, painted, and written text. As a constructed body, written upon and invented legally, socially, and psychologically, I am, in Hélène Cixous’s (“To Live the Orange” 83) words, “un-forgetting”, “un-silencing” and “unearthing” my ‘self’ – I am re-writing, re-inventing and, under public scrutiny, legitimising my ‘self’. I am a site of inquiry, discovery, extrapolation, and becoming (Metta 492; Poulus 475) and, as Grosz (vii) suggests, a body with “all the explanatory power” of the mind. I am, as I embroider myself and my LDA experience into literary and critical texts, authoring myself into existence, referencing with particular relevance Peter Carnochan’s (361) suggestion that “analysis...acts as midwife to the birth of being”. I am, as I swim forever amorphous, invisible, and unspoken in my mother’s womb, fashioning a shore, landscaping my mind against the constant wet, my chronic liminality (Rambo 629) providing social landfall for other LDAs and silenced minorities. As Catherine Lynch (3) writes regarding LDAs, “Through the creation of text and theory I can formulate an intimate space for a family of adoptive subjects I might never know via our participation in a new discourse in Australian academia.” I participate through my creative, self-reflexive, process fuelled (Durey 22), practice-led enquiry. I use the intimacy (and also universality and multiplicity) and illegitimacy of my body as an alterative text, as a site of academic and creative augmentation in the understanding of LDA issues. The relinquished and silenced baby and LDA adult needs a voice, a ‘body’, and a ‘tender’ place in the consciousness of society, as Helen Riley (“Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence” 11) suggests, “voice, validation, and vindication”. Judith Herman (3) argues that, “Survivors challenge us to reconnect fragments, to reconstruct history, to make meaning of their present symptoms in the light of past events”. I seek to use the example of my experience – as Judith Durey (31) suggests, in “support of evocative, creative modes of representation as valid forms of research in their own right” – to unfurl the whole, to give impetus and precedence for other researchers into adoption and advocate for future babies who may be bought, sold, arranged, and/or created by various means. The recent controversy over Gammy, the baby boy born with Down Syndrome in Thailand, highlights the urgent and moral need for legislation with regard to surrogacy (see Kajsa Ekis Ekman’s Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self for a comprehensive examination of surrogacy issues). Indeed, Catherine Lynch in her paper Doubting Adoption Legislation links the experiences of LDAs and the children of born of surrogacy, most effectively arguing that, “if the fate that closed record adoptees suffered was a misplaced solution to the question of what to do with children already conceived how can you justify the deliberate conception of a child with the intention even before its creation of cruelly removing that child from their mother?” (6). Cixous (xxii) confesses, “All I want is to illustrate, depict fragments, events of human life and death...each unique and yet at the same time exchangeable. Not the law, the exception”. I, too, am a fragment, an illustration (a painting), and, as every individual always is – paradoxically – a communal and, therefore, deeply recognisable and generally applicable minority and exception. In my illegitimacy, I am some kind of evidence. Evidence of cellular memory. Evidence of embodiment. Evidence that silenced illegitimacies will manifest in symptom and non-verbal narratives, that they will ooze out and await translation, verification, and witness. This paper is offered with reverence and with feminist intention, as a revenant mouthpiece for other LDAs, babies born of surrogacy, and donor assisted offspring (and, indeed, any) who are marginalised, silenced, and obscured. It is also intended to promote discussion in the psychological and psychoanalytic fields and, as Helen Riley (202-207) advocates regarding late discovery offspring, more research within the social sciences and the bio-medical field that may encourage legislators to better understand what the ‘best interests of the child’ are in terms of late discovery of origins and the complexity of adoption/conception practices available today. As I write now (and always) the umbilical from my paintings curve and writhe across my soul, twist and morph into the swollen and throbbing organ of tongues, my throat aching to utter, my hands ready to craft latent affect into language in translation of, and in obedience to, my body’s knowledges. It is the art of mute witness that reverses genesis, that keeps the umbilical fat and supple and full of blood, and allows my conscious conception and creation. Indeed, in the intersection of my theoretical, creative, psychological, and somatic praxis, the heat (read hot and messy, insightful and insistent signage) of my body’s knowledges perhaps intensifies – with a ripe bouquet – the inevitably ongoing odour/aroma of the reproductive world. ReferencesAngel, Maria, and Anna Gibbs. “On Moving and Being Moved: The Corporeality of Writing in Literary Fiction and New Media Art.” Literature and Sensation, eds. Anthony Uhlmann, Helen Groth, Paul Sheehan, and Stephan McLaren. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009: 162-172. Bollas, Christopher. The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. Brodzinsky, David. “Adjustment to Adoption: A Psychosocial Perspective.” Clinical Psychology Review 7 (1987): 25-47. doi: 10.1016/0272-7358(87)90003-1.Brodzinsky, David, Daniel Smith, and Anne Brodzinsky. Children’s Adjustment to Adoption: Developmental and Clinical Issues. California: Sage Publications, 1998.Carnochan, Peter. “Containers without Lids”. Psychoanalytic Dialogues 16.3 (2006): 341-362.Cixous, Hélène. “To Live the Orange”. The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1979/1994. 81-92. ---. “Preface.” The Hélène Cixous Reader: With a Preface by Hélène Cixous and Foreword by Jacques Derrida, ed. Susan Sellers. Oxford, UK: Routledge, 1994. xv-xxii.Coull, Kim. “Womb Tongues: A Collection of Poetry.” Honours Thesis. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2007. ---. “The Womb Artist – A Novel: Translating Late Discovery Adoptee Pre-Verbal Trauma into Narrative”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Durey, Judith. Translating Hiraeth, Performing Adoption: Art as Mediation and Form of Cultural Production. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Murdoch University, 2010. 22 Sep. 2011 .Ekis Ekman, Kajsa. Being and Being Bought: Prostitution, Surrogacy and the Split Self. Trans. S. Martin Cheadle. North Melbourne: Spinifex Press, 2013. Gardiner, Amanda. “Sex, Death and Desperation: Infanticide, Neonaticide, and Concealment of Birth in Colonial Western Australia”. Dissertation. Perth, WA: Edith Cowan University, 2014. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies. NSW: Allen &. Unwin, 1994. Grotevant, Harold D., Nora Dunbar, Julie K. Kohler, and Amy. M. Lash Esau. “Adoptive Identity: How Contexts within and beyond the Family Shape Developmental Pathways.” Family Relations 49.3 (2000): 79-87.Herman, Judith L. Trauma and Recovery: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. London: Harper Collins, 1992. Howard, Sethane, and Mark W. Crandall. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: What Happens in the Brain. Washington Academy of Sciences 93.3 (2007): 1-18.Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s List. London: Serpentine Publishing Company, 1982. Kenny, Pauline, Daryl Higgins, Carol Soloff, and Reem Sweid. Past Adoption Experiences: National Research Study on the Service Response to Past Adoption Practices. Research Report 21. Australian Institute of Family Studies, 2012.Kirby, Vicky. Telling Flesh: The Substance of the Corporeal. New York and London: Routledge, 1997. Klorer, P. Gussie. “Expressive Therapy with Severely Maltreated Children: Neuroscience Contributions.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 22.4 (2005): 213-220. doi:10.1080/07421656.2005.10129523.Levy-Shiff, Rachel. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees in Adulthood: Family Environment and Adoption-Related Correlates. International Journal of Behavioural Development 25 (2001): 97-104. doi: 1080/01650250042000131.Lifton, Betty J. “The Adoptee’s Journey.” Journal of Social Distress and the Homeless 11.2 (2002): 207-213. doi: 10.1023/A:1014320119546.Lusebrink, Vija B. “Art Therapy and the Brain: An Attempt to Understand the Underlying Processes of Art Expression in Therapy.” Journal of the American Art Therapy Association 21.3 (2004): 125-135. doi:10.1080/07421656. 2004.10129496.Lynch, Catherine. “An Ado/aptive Reading and Writing of Australia and Its Contemporary Literature.” Australian Journal of Adoption 1.1 (2009): 1-401.---. Doubting Adoption Legislation. n.d.McCutcheon, Sandy. The Magician’s Son: A Search for Identity. Sydney, NSW: Penguin, 2006. Metta, Marilyn. “Putting the Body on the Line: Embodied Writing and Recovery through Domestic Violence.” Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 486-509.Pert, Candace. Molecules of Emotion: The Science behind Mind-body Medicine. New York: Touchstone, 2007. Rambo, Carol. “Twitch: A Performance of Chronic Liminality.” Handbook of Autoethnography, eds. Stacy Holman Jones, Tony Adams, and Carolyn Ellis. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press, 2013: 627-638.Riley, Helen J. Identity and Genetic Origins: An Ethical Exploration of the Late Discovery of Adoptive and Donor-insemination Offspring Status. Dissertation. Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, 2012.---. “Confronting the Conspiracy of Silence and Denial of Difference for Late Discovery Persons and Donor Conceived People.” Australian Journal of Adoption 7.2 (2013): 1-13.Skilbeck, Ruth. “First Things: Reflection on Single-Lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-Angle Lens.” International Journal of the Image 3 (2013): 55-66. Talwar, Savneet. “Accessing Traumatic Memory through Art Making: An Art Therapy Trauma Protocol (ATTP)." The Arts in Psychotherapy 34 (2007): 22-25. doi:10.1016/ j.aip.2006.09.001.Verrier, Nancy. The Primal Wound: Understanding the Adopted Child. Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 1993.---. The Adopted Child Grows Up: Coming Home to Self. Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press, 2003. Wierzbicki, Michael. “Psychological Adjustment of Adoptees: A Meta-Analysis.” Journal of Clinical Child Psychology 22.4 (1993): 447-454. doi:10.1080/ 01650250042000131.
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Rahman, Mohmin. "Is Straight the New Queer?" M/C Journal 7, no.5 (November1, 2004). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2446.
Full textAbstract:
He is, surely, the only heterosexual male in the country who could get away with being photographed half-naked and smothered in baby oil for GQ and still come over as an icon of masculinity. (GQ October 2002. Article on Beckham as GQ’s Sportsman of the Year, 264) Indeed. Let us tear our thoughts away from the image of David basted in oil and consider the extract as one of innumerable examples of the media fascination with Beckham. Given his penetration in Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa, we can take as self-evident that Beckham is a quantifiably significant figure in contemporary global popular culture. By any measure of celebrity and any taxonomy of fame (Turner 15-23), Beckham qualifies as a striking example. He has inevitably appeared in a number of recent academic publications as an exemplar of celebrity and sports culture (Whannel, Turner, Cashmore and Parker) and, more notably in Cashmore’s book, as the focus of a social biography (Beckham). In his book Understanding Celebrity, Turner provides a comprehensive overview of the vast literature which has developed on issues of celebrity and fame, painting a broad picture of concerns divided between the significance of the apparent explosion in celebrity ‘culture’ and the focus on celebrities themselves. Within the literature on the social significance of celebrity culture, we can discern two key themes. First, celebrity culture is a manifestation of globalised commodity consumerism in advanced capitalism and second, its social function as a system of meanings and values which is supplanting traditional resources for self and social identities in late modern culture, including structures such as class, gender/sexuality, ethnicity and nationality. Whilst the authors mentioned above both draw on and contribute to these arguments, their focus remains broad, citing Beckham as a key manifestation of the complex interdependence between globalised sports and media industries, and transformations in gender and consumption. For example, although Cashmore’s book is solidly researched on the impact of media finance on football and has a sound argument on the significance of consumerism, he is prone to generalisations about the transformations in masculinity and celebrity culture which he suggests are central to understanding Beckham’s significance. Turner suggests that there needs to be more focused empirical work on the specific construction of celebrity since ‘modern celebrity…is a product of media representation: understanding it demands close attention to the representational repertoires and patterns employed in this discursive regime’ (8). This is how this short piece offers a contribution to the literature – drawing on a qualitative analysis of articles on Beckham, my discussion focuses on the meanings of Beckham’s celebrity and whether they can tell us something about the way the culture of fame operates. I have drawn selectively from my data, but a fuller discussion of both the data and grounded theory methodology can be found in a previous article (Rahman). Out of the six categories of meaning established through the grounded theory procedures used in the study, my contention is that masculinity is a core nexus in ‘cultural circuitry’ (Hall) – making the stories relevant, understandable, and often controversial. Moreover, the accompanying photo spreads often create a tension with the text, emphasising dissonant/controversial images which testifies to a dynamic of respect/ridicule in the representations. To be more precise, there is a construction of deference to Beckham’s professional status and to the Beckham family as the premier celebrity unit in the UK. Deference to and respect for their status is evident not only in those magazines which have paid for the privilege of access, but also the more gossip orientated celebrity weeklies such as Heat (18-24 May: 6-8): ‘those lucky enough to be asked to join David and Victoria enjoyed one the most extravagant soirees in recent memory. The sheer scale of the £350000 shindig was stunning, even by the standards of Celebville’s most extravagant couple’. Coupled with this respect is a sense of ridicule, often in discrete publications, but also within the same magazine and even sometimes the same article. Ridicule undercuts the celebrity credentials of extravagance and glamour with an implication of tackiness and vulgarity, and this gentle undercurrent becomes stronger when linked to Beckham’s fashion icon status: We’ve supported David through the highlights and lowlights of his various haircuts: the streaked curtains, the skinhead and his travis bickle style mohican. But this latest look is a ‘do too far’ – more village idiot than international style icon… (Heat 13-19 April: 24-5) This dynamic of respect/ridicule relies heavily on another dynamic; that of queer/normative invocation and recuperation. It is not only his fashion icon status being ridiculed here but also his status as a heterosexual masculine icon: People say you’re vain. Do you think so? You can see why people might think you’re a bit of a big girl’s blouse, because you have manicures, sunbeds and bleach your hair. You’re also one of the few footballers to become a gay icon. (Marie Claire June 2002: cover of Beckham, and 69-76) His gender/sexuality is anchored in hetero-family/masculine status but is somewhat dissonant in terms of vanity/grooming and gay icon status. ‘Queerying’ Beckham is not just a technique of ridicule (how very old fashioned that would be!) but also a deliberate destabilisation of ontological anchors which induces a sense of dissonance: An example from Heat (20-26 July 2002) has the cover byline ‘Phwoar! Another new look for Becks’ with a trail for a story on pages 18-20 which has a photograph of Beckham with his nail varnish highlighted and the text: David sported a new blonde barnet and a fitted black suit, and despite the controversy caused by his pink nail varnish he still managed to look macho and absolutely beautiful. This demonstrates some feminisation of Beckham but is counterbalanced by the very masculine anchor of ‘macho’. There is a recognition that the highlighted ambiguity in gender coding is potentially disruptive or controversial and hence it is recuperated – ‘he still managed to look macho’. GQ from June 2002 repeats the play on gender and sexuality, with a cover photo of Beckham lying down, bare torso but in a suit and hat, with one hand showing a ring and nail varnish, and the other in the waistband of his trousers. Inside, on pages 142-55, there follow seven full pages of photos and an interview conducted by David Furnish, a family friend of the Beckhams but also Elton John’s partner and so one of the most visible gay men in celebrity culture. However, rather than any danger of queering by association, the presence of Furnish seems only to enhance the mega-celebrity and hetero status, since he is careful to sound all the right notes of family, football and fatherhood in his questions in the text. Rather, it is the photospread which induces the queerness in this example, with four of Beckham’s naked torso in baby oil, of which one is him in unbuttoned cut-off denim shorts on a weights bench – very retro 1970s gay. In his history of male sports celebrities, Whannel suggests that Beckham is an exceptional figure, both because he is one of the few footballers in the UK to achieve full celebrity status, but also because he transgresses the discipline and work ethic associated with sporting bodies, indulging himself through conspicuous and narcissistic consumption (212). Whannel notes Beckham’s emergence during the development of a men’s style press in the UK, documented thoroughly in Nixon’s study of men’s magazines, which provides an account of the historical moment from 1984-1990 which saw the emergence of ‘new man’ imagery. Drawing on Mort’s contention that this is the first period which showed men being sexualised – a representational strategy previously applied only to women – Nixon concurs with Mort that this moment marks the beginning of men being addressed as a specific gender. However, these images of Beckham push at the boundaries of ‘new man’ constructions and ‘respectable’ images of sporting bodies, suggesting that the deliberate, indelicate and delicious sexualisation of Beckham’s body derives its power from the ‘danger’ this presents to sporting masculinity as well as simply heterosexual masculinity. Thus we need ‘family, fatherhood’ and ‘football’ to anchor the ‘queer’ Beckham. Given these and more recent images (Vanity Fair cover in July 2004, for example), we might be tempted to agree with Cashmore and Parker and Whannel that Beckham is indeed a ‘postmodern’ or ‘hybrid’ celebrity, appearing singularly able to float free of context and to signify many different meanings to many different groups. But the brief examples of the queer/normative dynamic presented here suggest that this is too glib an answer, precisely because there seems to be an explicit recognition of this dynamic: the editor of GQ says of Beckham that ‘he is in touch with his feminine side, but he is so obviously heterosexual that he can afford to be’ (Hot Stars 2-8 Nov. 2002: 36-9). The deliberate induction of dissonance suggests a reflexivity about the constructedness of these representations; a knowing indication that queerying Beckham’s masculinity is not the reality of Beckham, but rather that the queerying is perhaps a hyper reality as Baudrillard might have it. Beckham does not float ‘free’: dialectical signs are precisely mapped onto him. Dyer argues that film stars could be read as signs for specific versions of individuality, but crucially, that these signs reflect the dominant ideological constructions of class, ethnicity and gender/sexuality. In one example, he demonstrates how the sexually transgressive and potentially lesbian elements of Jane Fonda’s star persona are recuperated through the emphasis on her nationality and ethnicity, her ‘all-Americanness’ (81). Similarly, Beckham’s queerness is deliberately deployed as a sign, to be neutralised by heterosexual signs, thus recuperating the ideological dominance of a heteronormative culture. Beckham’s masculinity can be read as a ‘sign’, divorced from traditional referents and re-marked into a queer sign, specifically to promote consumption through the heady mix of respected status and apparently exciting transgression as a key aspect of this status. But this is a simulation, not indicating any ‘real’ queering of either the subject, or indeed of the assumed audience who have to make sense of the sign. Rather, the potential to remark Beckham as ‘queer’ seems to indicate that whilst heterosexual masculinity can be a sign, so perhaps too does queer itself become a sign, similarly divorced from its traditional referents. The ‘reality’ is thus simulated through pre-determined codes of representation, and one such code seems to be that gender transgression is culturally significant. Dialectical signs are mapped onto a reality/hyper reality dynamic, with queerness presented knowingly as the hyper real – after all, the reality is that Beckham is ‘so obviously heterosexual…’ It is possible to argue that the dynamics at work in making these representations effective can be understood as dialectical since there are opposing momentums at work in the construction of celebrity and fame. The respect/ridicule dynamic demonstrates that constructions of celebrity cannot be uncritically deferential. The gentle and knowing ridicule is a collusion between the media(tors) and the audience: an indication that this relationship is the true romance of celebrity culture rather than that between fans and icons. And why should this be so? Precisely because the media needs to continue to feed the desires of the audience but there is no guarantee that the desire will continue when an icon’s star wanes – unless of course, watching the decline is as much part of the romance as building the respect. Marshall argues that celebrity legitimises the individuality central to the lock between consumer capitalism and liberal democracy and the respect/ridicule dynamic exemplifies this function. The necessary continuation of consumption produces a dialectical dynamic, wherein both respect and ridicule exist to permit easy shifts in emphasis whilst maintaining the attention on the celebrity, which promotes continued consumption. Beckham’s own demonisation and rehabilitation in the wake of France 98 testifies convincingly to the necessity for continuity of producing items for consumption, no matter what the spin. Furthermore, the recent scandals over alleged infidelities has generated a production spike in the amount of images and words produced, whilst this time, not directly attacking Beckham. The queer constructions of Beckham amplify respect/ridicule along a specific dimension, supplying a dialectic of its own. The modes of meaning surrounding Beckham do indicate a shift in the possible effective constructions of masculinity, with the incorporation of a feminised interest in fashion (hairstyles, nail varnish, presentation in general) and the affirmation of gay icon/object of desire. It is in these constructions of dissonance that the de-essentialising of masculinity occurs, which may be the productive moment of disruption for those receiving the images and texts, and incorporating them into their own meaning systems around Beckham, footballers, masculinities, heteronormativity. The fact that these queer moments are possible may be testament enough to Beckham’s social significance; he is in the right place at the right time (with the right body and profession) to be our cultural lightning conductor for contemporary anxieties around gender/sexuality. However, the dialectic of queering Beckham has a synthesis which suggests that the route into queerness is not as important as the route out. These are only fleeting materialisations of the queer David Beckham – flashes of fleshy dissonance glimpsed briefly before the recuperation into the heterosexual subject, coded by footie, family and fatherhood. The newer dissonant properties of masculinity are literally contextualised within ideological codes of heterosexuality. The evident theatricalisation and appropriation may appear to signal a productive route into queerness – from heterosexual to queer (the pink nail varnish, the oiled fashion shoots, the gay gym denim cut offs shot), but what if it is actually working in reverse? What if the cultural effectivity is achieved by appropriating and theatricalising from gay/transgender to heterosexual? – de-essentialising ‘queer’ for productive dissonance and amusement, but safe in the knowledge that there is a secure and policed route out of ‘queerness’ – the encoded red carpet of heterosexual masculinity. The possibilities of a queer visibility are thus denied through the recuperative effects of the dialectics at work. The ridiculing of his gender transgressions may be necessarily gentle, in order to walk the tightrope of respect/ridicule, but they nonetheless assume that transgressions are problematic. Furthermore, the reality/hyper reality dynamic deploys queer as a ‘sign’ precisely in order to effect a recuperation of a normative version of ‘reality’. It seems that the weight of a predominantly heteronormative culture reinforces the dialectics in celebrity culture, making the unproblematic visibility of queer subjects improbable. After all, in these examples – focused one on the world’s premier celebrities – ‘queer’ itself is not actually cool – it seems that only the simulation of queer is cool. Within contemporary fame, perhaps straight is really the new queer? References Cashmore, E. Beckham. 2nd ed. Oxford: Polity Press, 2004. Cashmore, E., and A. Parker. “One David Beckham? Celebrity, Masculinity and the Soccerati.” Sociology of Sport Journal 20.3 (2003): 214-31. Dyer, R. Stars. 2nd ed. London: BFI, 1998. Hall, S. “Encoding/Decoding.” Reprinted from original 1977 publication at Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Culture, Media, Language. Ed. S. Hall. London: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Marshall, P.D. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. London: U of Minneapolis P, 1997. Mort, F. “Boy’s Own? Masculinity, Style and Popular Culture.” Male Order. Unwrapping Masculinity. Eds. J. Chapman and J. Rutherford. London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1998. 193-224. Nixon, S. Hard Looks: Masculinities, Spectatorship and Contemporary Consumption. London: UCL Press, 1996. Rahman, M. “David Beckham as a Historical Moment in the Representation of Masculinity.” Labour History Review 69.2 (Aug. 2004): 219-34. Turner, G. Understanding Celebrity. London: Sage, 2004. Whannel, G. Media Sport Stars: Masculinities and Moralities. London: Routledge, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Rahman, Mohmin. "Is Straight the New Queer?: David Beckham and the Dialectics of Celebrity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/15-rahman.php>. APA Style Rahman, M. (Nov. 2004) "Is Straight the New Queer?: David Beckham and the Dialectics of Celebrity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/15-rahman.php>.
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35
Stead, Naomi. "White cubes and red knots." M/C Journal 5, no.3 (July1, 2002). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1961.
Full textAbstract:
The question of colour in architecture offers many potential points of entry. Taking an historical standpoint, one could discuss the use of bright colour in ancient Greek and Roman architecture, the importance of brilliantly coloured mosaic and stained glass to sacred architecture in the Byzantine and medieval periods, and the primacy of colour in non-Western architectural traditions both ancient and modern. It would be possible to trace prohibitions against the use of applied colour, derived from late 18th century notions of architectural morality—ideals demanding authenticity, honesty and directness in the expression of structure, function and materials. This puritan strand could be pursued into the modern movement, to its quasi-pathological attachment to whiteness.1 It would also be possible to note a trend which ran counter to dominant modernist attitudes to colour, in the eclectic 'neon historicism' of so-called 'post-modernist' architecture. But while it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the history of colour in architecture in passing, it has been well addressed elsewhere, and is in any case outside the scope of this paper.2 What is significant is that this history is marked throughout by many of the same, largely unspoken, prohibitions against colour that can be traced across other cultural realms—that which David Batchelor has described as a history of 'chromophobia'. As Batchelor writes; 'Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity…. [T]his purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some 'foreign' body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other it is perceived merely as a secondary quantity of experience, and thus unworthy or serious consideration.'3 Numerous examples of the attempt to 'purge' colour can be identified throughout the history of architecture in the modern period. The mode of chromophobia particular to architecture may be summarised thus: colour in architecture has been associated with illusion and frivolity, and thus with decoration—it has been seen as being excess or supplementary to 'real' architecture.4 Discussions of colour in architecture can never be completely distinguished from discussions of ornament, or of materials and materiality. Colour is not necessarily a problem in itself—it is acceptable, for instance, when it is inherent to the material or to its weathering process, as in the bright green of copper verdigris. It is the application of colour, in the form of paint or stain, that raises questions of authenticity. The importance of surface and colour have been consistently made subordinate to architectural form; and the idea that colour is acceptable in interiors but not exteriors is merely the expression of another hierarchy, linking and demoting the trivial, contingent, feminised interior in favour of universal, masculinized, heroic external form. In the modern period, a work of 'serious' Architecture (as opposed to vernacular, commercial, or 'popular' architecture) has most often either been white, or coloured in the subdued palette afforded by the inherent characteristics of 'natural' materials.5 This is nowhere more true than in institutional architecture generally, and museum architecture in particular. Museums and their stake in the neutral monochrome The museum as an institution has traditionally functioned as a symbol of the establishment and its authority, a symbolic role often expressed in conventionally monumental architecture. This monumentality has, in turn, been reinforced by prestigious materials: much of the dignity and status of institutional architecture is taken from materials valued for their expense, rarity, or durability.6 Museum buildings are required to last, and thus they must not only use enduring materials, but materials which demonstrate their durability by being self-finishing in their natural, apparently neutral, state. The very idea that 'natural' materials are also somehow 'neutral' opens onto another, more ideological investment that the museum has in avoiding colour. Museums have long held a stake in the idea of an objective stance, and maintained the pretence of an unmediated presentation of historical fact. The notion of the museum as 'white cube' embodies all of this—the idea of the white cube, with its aformal form and achromatic colour, signifies purity and transcendence. Just as the whiteness of modern architecture was a continuation of the hygienic whiteness of doctor's coat, bathroom tiles, and hospital walls, the whiteness of the museum signifies clinical objectivity.7 It also, perhaps more significantly, stands for the ideal of the tabula rasa, the clean slate upon which the documentary evidence of art, history, or any other metanarrative could be methodically examined and arranged. For the museum, abandoning the neutrality of its public presentation may also mean a symbolic abandonment of objectivity. It would mean, if not a surrender to partiality, at least the admission of partiality—and the renunciation of universal whiteness for the specificities of colour. In the modern period, applied colour can never be neutral, but is read as mask, disguise, or stain. In the postmodern period, the discourse of the 'new museology' has challenged and discredited many of the ideological complicities of the idea of the museum as 'white box', linked as they are with a suspiciously absolutist rhetoric of abstract purity. Museums have increasingly begun to render explicit their role in the re-presentation of history, and to work at recontextualising ideas and artefacts. But even if a critical and self-reflexive stance is now more common in museological practice, it has taken much longer to begin to inform museum architecture. It would be a very courageous museum indeed that was willing to cash in all of the chips of its cultural authority, of which prestigious monumental architecture is a particularly powerful source. Most museums are still, if not white, at least respectably neutral, inside and out. But not so the National Museum of Australia (NMA). This museum, in its polychromatic formal complexity, could hardly be further from a 'white cube' museum. The National Museum of Australia: flirting with the flippant The NMA is housed in a loud and gregarious building. From its controversial strategy of literally appropriating elements from other canonical modernist works, through the coded messages of the Braille patterns on its surface, to the device of the extruded string and red 'knot' which passes through and around the building's form, it is relentless in its challenge to conventional institutional architecture. This is nowhere more true than in its colouration—there is hardly a neutral tone in sight. For that matter, there is hardly a 'natural' material in sight either—the majority of the building is constructed from pre-formed aluminium panelling in grey, yellow, red and khaki, crossed in places by sweeping calligraphic symbols.8 The dramatic aerial loop at the museum's entry is white and bright orange. There are walls of black dimpled pre-formed concrete, blue painted poles (get it?), a 'Mexican wave' of multicoloured steel sheets, and of course the richly cacophonous Garden of Australia Dreams. There are also some deliberate plays on colour symbolism—Le Corbusier's gleaming white modernist classic, the Villa Savoye, is reversed and reconstituted in black, corrugated steel. The fact that this forms part of the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is a hint of the building's clear, even dangerously frank, employment of colour symbolism. Given the architects previous work, we can safely assume that in this case, as elsewhere in the building, the choice of colours is calculated for maximum rhetorical effect. But I am less concerned here with the specific ploys of the architects than with the ways in which the building's reception has been conditioned by its employment of colour, specifically the ways in which it has been construed as populist. The NMA has polarised the architectural community in Australia. While much of the comment directed at the building has centred around its contravention of standards of taste and propriety in civic architecture, I would argue that this is only the symptom of a deeper reaction against its apparent frivolity, as signified most strongly by its colour. This is exemplified in a critique of the building by Stephen Frith, a respected Canberra academic. Concluding a polemical review in the Canberra Times, Frith asks: But why such tongue-lashings and breast-beatings over what has quickly established itself as a happy theme park to mediocrity? Surely its condoning of the ruthless kitsch of petty capitalism in its imagery and finishes provides for some spectre of merit? The problem becomes one of the civic domain in which architecture and its rhetoric is interpreted. For a supposedly public work, the museum is an intensely private building, privately encoded with in-jokes, and in the end hugely un-funny... The confection of cheap cladding and plasterboard is a spurious sideshow of magpie borrowings passing themselves off as cultural reference...9 Everything in this passage decries what Frith reads as the NMA's verisimilitude of popularity - the reference to theme-parks, sideshows, commercialism - a confection constructed with poor quality materials and finishes, which nevertheless flirts 'pretentiously' with the canon of modern architecture. To Frith the building reads not as a cheap and cheerful reflection of the Australian vernacular, but as a demeaning attempt to raise a laugh from the elite at the expense of the uncomprehending masses. His complaint is thus two-fold—that the building has insufficient gravitas, and that this is compounded rather than redeemed by the fact that it is not truly popular at all, but rather 'intensely private'. There is an important distinction to be made here, then, between 'populism' and 'popularity'. Populism has the negative connotation of deliberately seeking popular acceptance at the cost of quality, intellectual rigour, or formal aesthetic value. 'Popularity' still retains its more neutral modern sense, either of actual public involvement, or of things that are socially recognised as popular. In architecture, populism is already hedged about with prohibitions springing from the idea that a deliberately populist architecture is somehow fraudulent. A piece of serious, civic, monumental architecture should neither set out expressly to be popular, nor to look like it is, so the logic goes: if a work of high architecture happens to gain popular acclaim, then that is a happy accident. But there are significant reasons why such popularity must be seen to be incidental to other, more lofty concerns. Given that colour is seen to be 'popular', a highly coloured building is thus assumed to be 'lowering' itself in order to appeal to popular taste. Old systems of thought endure, and both museums and architecture are each subject to an unspoken hierarchy that still sees 'populism', if not actual popularity, as inferior. Conclusions: colour as the sign of a critical engagement But there is another possible reading of the NMA's apparent populism. I would argue that the building in fact presents and problematises the question of popularity in formal architectural terms. This leads to a proposition: that there is a 'look' of populism that exists independently of any intended or actual popularity, or even a connection with popular culture. I would argue that the NMA opens an elaborate play on this 'look' of the popular, and that it does so by manipulating certain key aesthetic devices: literal and figurative elements, visual jokes, non-orthogonal forms, and most significantly, bright and mixed colour. Such devices carry a weight of expectation and association, they cause a building to be read or socially recognised as being populist, largely as a result of pre-existing dichotomies between 'high' and 'low' art. In this conception the NMA, turning the modernist prohibition on its head, uses colour as the deliberately frivolous disguise of a profoundly serious intent. Rather than concealing the absence of meaning, it conceals an overabundance of meaning—a despairing accumulation of piled up allegories, codes and fragments. It is thus deeply ironic that the NMA has been read as a light, flippant, and populist confection, since I would argue that it could hardly be further from being those things. Rather than taking the usual path, of seeking cultural authority through allusion to traditional monumental architecture, the NMA makes perverse references to the seemingly trivial, commercial, and populist. The reasons why the architects might want the building to be (mis)read in this way are complex. But by renouncing the aesthetic trappings of a serious institution, the NMA reveals the very superficiality of such trappings. Furthermore, by renouncing the 'look of authority' in favour of colour, frivolity, and apparent populism, it introduces a note of doubt. Could the building, and thus the institution - a national museum, remember, charged with representing the nation and placed in the national capital - really be as flippant as it seems? Or is there some more subtle game afoot, a subversive questioning of accepted notions of Australian national history and national identity? I would argue that this is so. In the NMA, then, colour is the sign of a critical engagement. It positions the building itself as a discourse or discussion, not only of architectural colour as conferring inferiority and flippancy, but of a lack of colour as conferring authority and legitimacy. Of course, it is precisely because of architecture's history of chromophobia that colour can itself become a tool for subversiveness, provide an invitation to alternative readings, and collapse unspoken hierarchies. In this respect, the colour in and of the NMA provides an emblem of that which has long been marginalised in architecture, and in culture more generally. Notes 1. Mark Wigley writes that the primacy of whiteness in high modernist architecture (particularly the work of Le Corbusier) lies partly in the removal of decoration. '[The] erasure of decoration is portrayed [by Le Corbusier] as the necessary gesture of a civilized society. Indeed, civilization is defined as the elimination of the 'superfluous' in favour of the 'essential' and the paradigm of inessential surplus is decoration. Its removal liberates a new visual order. Echoing an argument at least as old as Western philosophy, Le Corbusier describes civilization as a gradual passage from the sensual to the intellectual, from the tactile to the visual. Decoration's 'caresses of the senses' are progressively abandoned in favour of the visual harmony of proportion.' Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, pp. 2-3 2. See for example John Gage's superb and authoritative history of the use and meaning of colour, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism, Thames and Hudson, London, 1999. For a survey of the use of colour in architecture, see Tom Porter, Architectural Colour: A Design Guide to Using Colour on Buildings, Whitney Library of Design, New York, 1982, or the more recent Architectural Design Profile number 120: Colour in Architecture, AD, vol. 66, no 3/4, March/April 1996. These are only a few examples of the available literature. 3. David Batchelor, Chromophobia, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, pp. 22-23. 4. The notable exception to this - the architecture of schools is emblematic in itself: colour is appealing to children, so the logic would go, because they have undeveloped, 'primitive' tastes. 5. William Braham has perceptively examined the allure of 'natural' materials and colours in the modern period. He writes that 'the natural can only be understood as a somewhat flexible category of finishes, not by a single principle of use, manufacture, or appearance. The fact that a family of paint colours neutrals, ochres, and other earth colours fit within the definition of natural is only partly explained by their original manufacture with naturally occurring mineral compounds. Though they are opaque surface coatings, they resemble the tones produced in natural materials by weathering.' He goes on to say that the 'natural/neutral palette' is characterised by 'the difficult pursuit of authenticity', and this question goes indeed to the heart of the issue of colour in architecture. William W. Braham, 'A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colours in Modern Architecture', JAE Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53. No.1, September 1999, p. 10. 6. But perhaps more important than actual durability in institutional architecture is the appearance of durability, and this appearance is undermined by protective treatments like paint, whether coloured or not. Materials which are seen as flimsy or fragile may as well be coloured, so the logic goes, since they require constant re-painting anyway, and since it fits their low status. 7. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, p. 5. 8. Aluminium panelling is a new technology and a new material one that was unknown in the high modernist period but which is becoming increasingly ubiquitous today. The fact that aluminium panelling is coloured during the manufacturing process opens a new and interesting question: is this colour inherent, or is it simply applied earlier in the building process? Is it, in other words, an 'honest' or a 'dishonest' colour? Given that aluminium does have its own colour, and that it can be lacquered or anodised to retain that colour, it seems that the aluminium panelling of the NMA have been received as 'dishonest'. 9. Frith, 'A monument to lost opportunity', The Canberra Times, 20 March 2001 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stead, Naomi. "White cubes and red knots" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php>. Chicago Style Stead, Naomi, "White cubes and red knots" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Stead, Naomi. (2002) White cubes and red knots. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php> ([your date of access]).
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36
Masson, Sophie Veronique. "Fairy Tale Transformation: The Pied Piper Theme in Australian Fiction." M/C Journal 19, no.4 (August31, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1116.
Full textAbstract:
The traditional German tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin inhabits an ambiguous narrative borderland, a liminal space between fact and fiction, fantasy and horror, concrete details and elusive mystery. In his study of the Pied Piper in Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature, Wolfgang Mieder describes how manuscripts and other evidence appear to confirm the historical base of the story. Precise details from a fifteenth-century manuscript, based on earlier sources, specify that in 1284 on the 26th of June, the feast-day of Saints John and Paul, 130 children from Hamelin were led away by a piper clothed in many colours to the Koppen Hill, and there vanished (Mieder 48). Later manuscripts add details familiar today, such as a plague of rats and a broken bargain with burghers as a motive for the Piper’s actions, while in the seventeenth century the first English-language version advances what might also be the first attempt at a “rational” explanation for the children’s disappearance, claiming that they were taken to Transylvania. The uncommon pairing of such precise factual detail with enigmatic mystery has encouraged many theories. These have ranged from references to the Children’s Crusade, or other religious fervours, to the devastation caused by the Black Death, from the colonisation of Romania by young German migrants to a murderous rampage by a paedophile. Fictional interpretations of the story have multiplied, with the classic versions of the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning being most widely known, but with contemporary creators exploring the theme too. This includes interpretations in Hamelin itself. On 26 June 2015, in Hamelin Museum, I watched a wordless five-minute play, entirely performed not by humans but by animatronic stylised figures built out of scrap iron, against a montage of multilingual, confused voices and eerie music, with the vanished children represented by a long line of small empty shirts floating by. The uncanny, liminal nature of the story was perfectly captured. Australia is a world away from German fairy tale mysteries, historically, geographically, and culturally. Yet, as Lisa M. Fiander has persuasively argued, contemporary Australian fiction has been more influenced by fairy tales than might be assumed, and in this essay it is proposed that major motifs from the Pied Piper appear in several Australian novels, transformed not only by distance of setting and time from that of the original narrative, but also by elements specific to the Australian imaginative space. These motifs are lost children, the enigmatic figure of the Piper himself, and the power of a very particular place (as Hamelin and its Koppen Hill are particularised in the original tale). Three major Australian novels will be examined in this essay: Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), Christopher Koch’s The Doubleman (1985), and Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011). Dubosarsky’s novel was written for children; both Koch’s and Lindsay’s novels were published as adult fiction. In each of these works of fiction, the original tale’s motifs have been developed and transformed to express unique evocations of the Pied Piper theme. As noted by Fiander, fiction writers are “most likely to draw upon fairy tales when they are framing, in writing, a subject that generates anxiety in their culture” (158). Her analysis is about anxieties of place within Australian fiction, but this insight could be usefully extended to the motifs which I have identified as inherent in the Pied Piper story. Prominent among these is the lost children motif, whose importance in the Australian imagination has been well-established by scholars such as Peter Pierce. Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety explores this preoccupation from the earliest beginnings of European settlement, through analysis of fiction, newspaper reports, paintings, and films. As Pierce observed in a later interview in the Sydney Morning Herald (Knox), over time the focus changed from rural children and the nineteenth-century fear of the vast impersonal nature of the bush, where children of colonists could easily get lost, to urban children and the contemporary fear of human predators.In each of the three novels under examination in this essay, lost children—whether literal or metaphorical—feature prominently. Writer Carmel Bird, whose fiction has also frequently centred on the theme of the lost child, observes in “Dreaming the Place” that the lost child, the stolen child – this must be a narrative that is lodged in the heart and imagination, nightmare and dream, of all human beings. In Australia the nightmare became reality. The child is the future, and if the child goes, there can be no future. The true stories and the folk tales on this theme are mirror images of each other. (7) The motif of lost children—and of children in danger—is not unique to the Pied Piper. Other fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, contain it, and it is those antecedents which Bird cites in her essay. But within the Pied Piper story it has three features which distinguish it from other traditional tales. First, unlike in the classic versions of Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood, the children do not return. Neither are there bodies to find. The children have vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. Second, it is not only parents who have lost them, but an entire community whose future has been snatched away: a community once safe, ordered, even complacent, traumatised by loss. The lack of hope, of a happy ending for anyone, is striking. And thirdly, the children are not lost or abandoned or even, strictly speaking, stolen: they are lured away, semi-willingly, by the central yet curiously marginal figure of the Piper himself. In the original story there is no mention of motive and no indication of malice on the part of the Piper. There is only his inexplicable presence, a figure out of fairy folklore appearing in the midst of concrete historical dates and numbers. Clearly, he links to the liminal, complex world of the fairies, found in folklore around the world—beings from a world close to the human one, yet alien. Whimsical and unpredictable by human standards, such beings are nevertheless bound by mysteriously arbitrary rules and taboos, and haunt the borders of the human world, disturbing its rational edges and transforming lives forever. It is this sense of disturbance, that enchanting yet frightening sudden shifting of the border of reality and of the comforting order of things, the essence of transformation itself, which can also be seen at the core of the three novels under examination in this essay, with the Piper represented in each of them but in different ways. The third motif within the Pied Piper is a focus on place as a source of uncanny power, a theme which particularly resonates within an Australian context. Fiander argues that if contemporary British fiction writers use fairy tale to explore questions of community and alienation, and Canadian fiction writers use it to explore questions of identity, then Australian writers use it to explore the unease of place. She writes of the enduring legacy of Australia’s history “as a settler colony which invests the landscape with strangeness for many protagonists” (157). Furthermore, she suggests that “when Australian fiction writers, using fairy tales, describe the landscape as divorced from reality, they might be signalling anxiety about their own connection with the land which had already seen tens of thousands of years of occupation when Captain James Cook ‘found’ it in 1770” (160). I would argue, however, that in the case of the Pied Piper motifs, it is less clear that it is solely settler anxieties which are driving the depiction of the power of place in these three novels. There is no divorce from reality here, but rather an eruption of the metaphysical potency of place within the usual, “normal” order of reality. This follows the pattern of the original tale, where the Piper and all the children, except for one or two stragglers, disappear at Koppen Hill, vanishing literally into the hill itself. In traditional European folklore, hollow hills are associated with fairies and their uncanny power, but other places, especially those of water—springs, streams, even the sea—may also be associated with their liminal world (in the original tale, the River Weser is another important locus for power). In Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is another outcrop in the landscape which holds that power and claims the “lost children.” Inspired partly by a painting by nineteenth-century Australian artist William Ford, titled At the Hanging Rock (1875), depicting a group of elegant people picnicking in the bush, this influential novel, which inspired an equally successful film adaptation, revolves around an incident in 1900 when four girls from Appleyard College, an exclusive school in Victoria, disappear with one of their teachers whilst climbing Hanging Rock, where they have gone for a picnic. Only one of their number, a girl called Irma, is ever found, and she has no memory of how and why she found herself on the Rock, and what has happened to the others. This inexplicable event is the precursor to a string of tragedies which leads to the violent deaths of several people, and which transforms the sleepy and apparently content little community around Appleyard College into a centre of loss, horror, and scandal.Told in a way which makes it appear that the novelist is merely recounting a true story—Lindsay even tells readers in an author’s note that they must decide for themselves if it is fact or fiction—Picnic at Hanging Rock shares the disturbingly liminal fact-fiction territory of the Piper tale. Many readers did in fact believe that the novel was based on historical events and combed newspaper files, attempting to propound ingenious “rational” explanations for what happened on the Rock. Picnic at Hanging Rock has been the subject of many studies, with the novel being analysed through various prisms, including the Gothic, the pastoral, historiography, and philosophy. In “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush,” Kathleen Steele has depicted Picnic at Hanging Rock as embodying the idea that “Ordered ‘civilisation’ cannot overcome the gothic landscapes of settler imaginations: landscapes where time and people disappear” (44). She proposes that Lindsay intimates that the landscape swallows the “lost children” of the novel because there is a great absence in that place: that of Aboriginal people. In this reading of the novel, it is that absence which becomes, in a sense, a malevolent presence that will reach out beyond the initial disappearance of the three people on the Rock to destroy the bonds that held the settler community together. It is a powerfully-made argument, which has been taken up by other scholars and writers, including studies which link the theme of the novel with real-life lost-children cases such as that of Azaria Chamberlain, who disappeared near another “Rock” of great Indigenous metaphysical potency—Uluru, or Ayers Rock. However, to date there has been little exploration of the fairy tale quality of the novel, and none at all of the striking ways in which it evokes Pied Piper motifs, whilst transforming them to suit the exigencies of its particular narrative world. The motif of lost children disappearing from an ordered, safe, even complacent community into a place of mysterious power is extended into an exploration of the continued effects of those disappearances, depicting the disastrous impact on those left behind and the wider community in a way that the original tale does not. There is no literal Pied Piper figure in this novel, though various theories are evoked by characters as to who might have lured the girls and their teacher, and who might be responsible for the disappearances. Instead, there is a powerful atmosphere of inevitability and enchantment within the landscape itself which both illustrates the potency of place, and exemplifies the Piper’s hold on his followers. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, place and Piper are synonymous: the Piper has been transformed into the land itself. Yet this is not the “vast impersonal bush,” nor is it malevolent or vengeful. It is a living, seductive metaphysical presence: “Everything, if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete . . .” (Lindsay 35). Just as in the original tale, the lost children follow the “Piper” willingly, without regret. Their disappearance is a happiness to them, in that moment, as it is for the lost children of Hamelin, and quite unlike how it must be for those torn apart by that loss—the community around Appleyard, the townspeople of Hamelin. Music, long associated with fairy “takings,” is also a subtle feature of the story. In the novel, just before the luring, Irma hears a sound like the beating of far-off drums. In the film, which more overtly evokes fairy tale elements than does the novel, it is noteworthy that the music at that point is based on traditional tunes for Pan-pipes, played by the great Romanian piper Gheorge Zamfir. The ending of the novel, with questions left unanswered, and lives blighted by the forever-inexplicable, may be seen as also following the trajectory of the original tale. Readers as much as the fictional characters are left with an enigma that continues to perplex and inspire. Picnic at Hanging Rock was one of the inspirations for another significant Australian fiction, this time a contemporary novel for children. Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011) is an elegant and subtle short novel, set in Sydney at an exclusive girls’ school, in 1967. Like the earlier novel, The Golden Day is also partly inspired by visual art, in this case the Schoolgirl series of paintings by Charles Blackman. Combining a fairy tale atmosphere with historical details—the Vietnam War, the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the drowning of Harold Holt—the story is told through the eyes of several girls, especially one, known as Cubby. The Golden Day echoes the core narrative patterns of the earlier novel, but intriguingly transformed: a group of young girls goes with their teacher on an outing to a mysterious place (in this case, a cave on the beach—note the potent elements of rock and water, combined), and something inexplicable happens which results in a disappearance. Only this time, the girls are much younger than the characters of Lindsay’s novel, pre-pubertal in fact at eleven years old, and it is their teacher, a young, idealistic woman known only as Miss Renshaw, who disappears, apparently into thin air, with only an amber bead from her necklace ever found. But it is not only Miss Renshaw who vanishes: the other is a poet and gardener named Morgan who is also Miss Renshaw’s secret lover. Later, with the revelation of a dark past, he is suspected in absentia of being responsible for Miss Renshaw’s vanishment, with implications of rape and murder, though her body is never found. Morgan, who could partly figure as the Piper, is described early on in the novel as having “beautiful eyes, soft, brown, wet with tears, like a stuffed toy” (Dubosarsky 11). This disarming image may seem a world away from the ambiguously disturbing figure of the legendary Piper, yet not only does it fit with the children’s naïve perception of the world, it also echoes the fact that the children in the original story were not afraid of the Piper, but followed him willingly. However, that is complicated by the fact that Morgan does not lure the children; it is Miss Renshaw who follows him—and the children follow her, who could be seen as the other half of the Piper. The Golden Day similarly transforms the other Piper motifs in its own original way. The children are only literally lost for a short time, when their teacher vanishes and they are left to make their own way back from the cave; yet it could be argued that metaphorically, the girls are “lost” to childhood from that moment, in terms of never being able to go back to the state of innocence in which they were before that day. Their safe, ordered school community will never be the same again, haunted by the inexplicability of the events of that day. Meanwhile, the exploration of Australian place—the depiction of the Memorial Gardens where Miss Renshaw enjoins them to write poetry, the uncomfortable descent over rocks to the beach, and the fateful cave—is made through the eyes of children, not the adolescents and adults of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The girls are not yet in that liminal space which is adolescence and so their impressions of what the places represent are immediate, instinctive, yet confused. They don’t like the cave and can’t wait to get out of it, whereas the beach inspires them with a sense of freedom and the gardens with a sense of enchantment. But in each place, those feelings are mixed both with ordinary concerns and with seemingly random associations that are nevertheless potently evocative. For example, in the cave, Cubby senses a threateningly weightless atmosphere, a feeling of reality shifting, which she associates, apparently confusedly, with the hanging of Ronald Ryan, reported that very day. In this way, Dubosarsky subtly gestures towards the sinister inevitability of the following events, and creates a growing tension that will eventually fade but never fully dissipate. At the end, the novel takes an unexpected turn which is as destabilising as the ending of the Pied Piper story, and as open-ended in its transformative effects as the original tale: “And at that moment Cubby realised she was not going to turn into the person she had thought she would become. There was something inside her head now that would make her a different person, though she scarcely understood what it was” (Dubosarsky 148). The eruption of the uncanny into ordinary life will never leave her now, as it will never leave the other girls who followed Miss Renshaw and Morgan into the literally hollow hill of the cave and emerged alone into a transformed world. It isn’t just childhood that Cubby has lost but also any possibility of a comforting sense of the firm borders of reality. As in the Pied Piper, ambiguity and loss combine to create questions which cannot be logically answered, only dimly apprehended.Christopher Koch’s 1985 novel The Doubleman, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, also explores the power of place and the motif of lost children, but unlike the other two novels examined in this essay depicts an actual “incarnated” Piper motif in the mysteriously powerful figure of Clive Broderick, brilliant guitarist and charismatic teacher/guru, whose office, significantly, is situated in a subterranean space of knowledge—a basement room beneath a bookshop. Both central yet peripheral to the main action of the novel, touched with hints of the supernatural which never veer into overt fantasy, Broderick remains an enigma to the end. Set, like The Golden Day, in the 1960s, The Doubleman is narrated in the first person by Richard Miller, in adulthood a producer of a successful folk-rock group, the Rymers, but in childhood an imaginative, troubled polio survivor, with a crutch and a limp. It is noteworthy here that in the Grimms’ version of the Pied Piper, two children are left behind, despite following the Piper: one is blind, one is lame. And it is the lame boy who tells the townspeople what he glimpsed at Koppen Hill. In creating the character of Broderick, the author blends the traditional tropes of the Piper figure with Mephistophelian overtones and a strong influence from fairy lore, specifically the idea of the “doubleman,” here drawn from the writings of seventeenth-century Scottish pastor, the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle. Kirk’s 1691 book The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies is the earliest known serious attempt at objective description of the fairy beliefs of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. His own precisely dated life-story and ambiguous end—it is said he did not die but is forever a prisoner of the fairies—has eerie parallels to the Piper story. “And there is the uncanny, powerful and ambiguous fact of the matter. Here is a man, named, born, lived, who lived a fairy story, really lived it: and in the popular imagination, he lives still” (Masson).Both in his creative and his non-fiction work Koch frequently evoked what he called “the Otherland,” which he depicted as a liminal, ambiguous, destabilising but nevertheless very real and potent presence only thinly veiled by the everyday world. This Otherland is not the same in all his fictions, but is always part of an actual place, whether that be Java in The Year of Living Dangerously, Hobart and Sydney in The Doubleman, Tasmania, Vietnam and Cambodia in Highways to a War, and Ireland and Tasmania in Out of Ireland. It is this sense of the “Otherland” below the surface, a fairy tale, mythical realm beyond logic or explanation, which gives his work its distinctive and particular power. And in The Doubleman, this motif, set within a vividly evoked real world, complete with precise period detail, transforms the Piper figure into one which could easily appear in a Hobart lane, yet which loses none of its uncanny potency. As Noel Henricksen writes in his study of Koch’s work, Island and Otherland, “Behind the membrane of Hobart is Otherland, its manifestations a spectrum stretched between the mystical and the spiritually perverted” (213).This is Broderick’s first appearance, described through twelve-year-old Richard Miller’s eyes: Tall and thin in his long dark overcoat, he studied me for the whole way as he approached, his face absolutely serious . . . The man made me uneasy to a degree for which there seemed to be no explanation . . . I was troubled by the notion that he was no ordinary man going to work at all: that he was not like other people, and that his interest couldn’t be explained so simply. (Koch, Doubleman 3)That first encounter is followed by another, more disturbing still, when Broderick speaks to the boy, eyes fixed on him: “. . . hooded by drooping lids, they were entirely without sympathy, yet nevertheless interested, and formidably intelligent” (5).The sense of danger that Broderick evokes in the boy could be explained by a sinister hint of paedophilia. But though Broderick is a predator of sorts on young people, nothing is what it seems; no rational explanation encompasses the strange effect of his presence. It is not until Richard is a young man, in the company of his musical friend Brian Brady, that he comes across Broderick again. The two young men are looking in the window of a music shop, when Broderick appears beside them, and as Richard observes, just as in a fairy tale, “He didn’t seem to have changed or aged . . .” (44). But the shock of his sudden re-appearance is mixed with something else now, as Broderick engages Brady in conversation, ignoring Richard, “. . . as though I had failed some test, all that time ago, and the man had no further use for me” (45).What happens next, as Broderick demonstrates his musical prowess, becomes Brady’s teacher, and introduces them to his disciple, young bass player Darcy Burr, will change the young men’s lives forever and set them on a path that leads both to great success and to living nightmare, even after Broderick’s apparent disappearance, for Burr will take on the Piper’s mantle. Koch’s depiction of the lost children motif is distinctively different to the other two novels examined in this essay. Their fate is not so much a mystery as a tragedy and a warning. The lost children of The Doubleman are also lost children of the sixties, bright, talented young people drawn through drugs, immersive music, and half-baked mysticism into darkness and horrifying violence. In his essay “California Dreaming,” published in the collection Crossing the Gap, Koch wrote about this subterranean aspect of the sixties, drawing a connection between it and such real-life sinister “Pipers” as Charles Manson (60). Broderick and Burr are not the same as the serial killer Manson, of course; but the spell they cast over the “lost children” who follow them is only different in degree, not in kind. In the end of the novel, the spell is broken and the world is again transformed. Yet fittingly it is a melancholy transformation: an end of childhood dreams of imaginative potential, as well as dangerous illusions: “And I knew now that it was all gone—like Harrigan Street, and Broderick, and the district of Second-Hand” (Koch, Doubleman 357). The power of place, the last of the Piper motifs, is also deeply embedded in The Doubleman. In fact, as with the idea of Otherland, place—or Island, as Henricksen evocatively puts it—is a recurring theme in Koch’s work. He identified primarily and specifically as a Tasmanian writer rather than as simply Australian, pointing out in an essay, “The Lost Hemisphere,” that because of its landscape and latitude, different to the mainland of Australia, Tasmania “genuinely belongs to a different region from the continent” (Crossing the Gap 92). In The Doubleman, Richard Miller imbues his familiar and deeply loved home landscape with great mystical power, a power which is both inherent within it as it is, but also expressive of the Otherland. In “A Tasmanian Tone,” another essay from Crossing the Gap, Koch describes that tone as springing “from a sense of waiting in the landscape: the tense yet serene expectancy of some nameless revelation” (118). But Koch could also write evocatively of landscapes other than Tasmanian ones. The unnerving climax of The Doubleman takes place in Sydney—significantly, as in The Golden Day, in a liminal, metaphysically charged place of rocks and water. That place, which is real, is called Point Piper. In conclusion, the original tale’s three main motifs—lost children, the enigma of the Piper, and the power of place—have been explored in distinctive ways in each of the three novels examined in this article. Contemporary Australia may be a world away from medieval Germany, but the uncanny liminality and capacious ambiguity of the Pied Piper tale has made it resonate potently within these major Australian fictions. Transformed and transformative within the Australian imagination, the theme of the Pied Piper threads like a faintly-heard snatch of unearthly music through the apparently mimetic realism of the novels, destabilising readers’ expectations and leaving them with subversively unanswered questions. ReferencesBird, Carmel. “Dreaming the Place: An Exploration of Antipodean Narratives.” Griffith Review 42 (2013). 1 May 2016 <https://griffithreview.com/articles/dreaming-the-place/>.Dubosarsky, Ursula. The Golden Day. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011.Fiander, Lisa M. “Writing in A Fairy Story Landscape: Fairy Tales and Contemporary Australian Fiction.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 2 (2003). 30 April 2016 <http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/index>.Henricksen, Noel. Island and Otherland: Christopher Koch and His Books. Melbourne: Educare, 2003.Knox, Malcolm. “A Country of Lost Children.” Sydney Morning Herald 15 Aug. 2009. 1 May 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-country-of-lost-children-20090814-el8d.html>.Koch, Christopher. The Doubleman. 1985. Sydney: Minerva, 1996.Koch, Christopher. Crossing the Gap: Memories and Reflections. 1987. Sydney: Vintage, 2000. Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock. 1967. Melbourne: Penguin, 1977.Masson, Sophie. “Captive in Fairyland: The Strange Case of Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle.” Nation and Federation in the Celtic World: Papers from the Fourth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies, University of Sydney, June–July 2001. Ed. Pamela O’Neil. Sydney: University of Sydney Celtic Studies Foundation, 2003. Mieder, Wolfgang. “The Pied Piper: Origin, History, and Survival of a Legend.” Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature. 1987. London: Routledge Revivals, 2015.Pierce, Peter. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Steele, Kathleen. “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush: Gothic Landscapes in Bush Studies and Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Colloquy 20 (2010): 33–56. 27 July 2016 <http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts/files/colloquy/colloquy_issue_20_december_2010/steele.pdf>.
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Rocavert, Carla. "Aspiring to the Creative Class: Reality Television and the Role of the Mentor." M/C Journal 19, no.2 (May4, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1086.
Full textAbstract:
Introduction Mentors play a role in real life, just as they do in fiction. They also feature in reality television, which sits somewhere between the two. In fiction, mentors contribute to the narrative arc by providing guidance and assistance (Vogler 12) to a mentee in his or her life or professional pursuits. These exchanges are usually characterized by reciprocity, the need for mutual recognition (Gadamer 353) and involve some kind of moral question. They dramatise the possibilities of mentoring in reality, to provide us with a greater understanding of the world, and our human interaction within it. Reality television offers a different perspective. Like drama it uses the plot device of a mentor character to heighten the story arc, but instead of focusing on knowledge-based portrayals (Gadamer 112) of the mentor and mentee, the emphasis is instead on the mentee’s quest for ascension. In attempting to transcend their unknownness (Boorstin) contestants aim to penetrate an exclusive creative class (Florida). Populated by celebrity chefs, businessmen, entertainers, fashionistas, models, socialites and talent judges (to name a few), this class seemingly adds authenticity to ‘competitions’ and other formats. While the mentor’s role, on the surface, is to provide divine knowledge and facilitate the journey, a different agenda is evident in the ways carefully scripted (Booth) dialogue heightens the drama through effusive praise (New York Daily News) and “tactless” (Woodward), humiliating (Hirschorn; Winant 69; Woodward) and cruel sentiments. From a screen narrative point of view, this takes reality television as ‘storytelling’ (Aggarwal; Day; Hirschorn; “Reality Writer”; Rupel; Stradal) into very different territory. The contrived and later edited (Crouch; Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) communication between mentor and mentee not only renders the relationship disingenuous, it compounds the primary ethical concerns of associated Schadenfreude (Balasubramanian, Forstie and van den Scott 434; Cartwright), and the severe financial inequality (Andrejevic) underpinning a multi-billion dollar industry (Hamilton). As upward mobility and instability continue to be ubiquitously portrayed in 21st century reality entertainment under neoliberalism (Sender 4; Winant 67), it is with increasing frequency that we are seeing the systematic reinvention of the once significant cultural and historical role of the mentor. Mentor as Fictional Archetype and Communicator of ThemesDepictions of mentors can be found across the Western art canon. From the mythological characters of Telemachus’ Athena and Achilles’ Chiron, to King Arthur’s Merlin, Cinderella’s Fairy Godmother, Jim Hawkins’ Long John Silver, Frodo’s Gandalf, Batman’s Alfred and Marty McFly’s Doc Emmett Brown (among many more), the dramatic energy of the teacher, expert or supernatural aid (Vogler 39) has been timelessly powerful. Heroes, typically, engage with a mentor as part of their journey. Mentor types range extensively, from those who provide motivation, inspiration, training or gifts (Vogler), to those who may be dark or malevolent, or have fallen from grace (such as Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko in Wall Street 1987, or the ex-tribute Haymitch in The Hunger Games, 2012). A good drama usually complicates the relationship in some way, exploring initial reluctance from either party, or instances of tragedy (Vogler 11, 44) which may prevent the relationship achieving its potential. The intriguing twist of a fallen or malevolent mentor additionally invites the audience to morally analyze the ways the hero responds to what the mentor provides, and to question what our teachers or superiors tell us. In television particularly, long running series such as Mad Men have shown how a mentoring relationship can change over time, where “non-rational” characters (Buzzanell and D’Enbeau 707) do not necessarily maintain reciprocity or equality (703) but become subject to intimate, ambivalent and erotic aspects.As the mentor in fiction has deep cultural roots for audiences today, it is no wonder they are used, in a variety of archetypal capacities, in reality television. The dark Simon Cowell (of Pop Idol, American Idol, Britain’s Got Talent, America’s Got Talent and The X-Factor series) and the ‘villainous’ (Byrnes) Michelin-starred Marco Pierre White (Hell’s Kitchen, The Chopping Block, Marco Pierre White’s Kitchen Wars, MasterChef Australia, New Zealand, South Africa) provide reality writers with much needed antagonism (Rupel, Stradal). Those who have fallen from grace, or allowed their personal lives to play out in tabloid sagas such as Britney Spears (Marikar), or Caitlyn Jenner (Bissinger) provide different sources of conflict and intrigue. They are then counterbalanced with or repackaged as the good mentor. Examples of the nurturer who shows "compassion and empathy" include American Idol’s Paula Abdul (Marche), or the supportive Jennifer Hawkins in Next Top Model (Thompson). These distinctive characters help audiences to understand the ‘reality’ as a story (Crouch; Rupel; Stradal). But when we consider the great mentors of screen fiction, it becomes clear how reality television has changed the nature of story. The Karate Kid I (1984) and Good Will Hunting (1998) are two examples where mentoring is almost the exclusive focus, and where the experience of the characters differs greatly. In both films an initially reluctant mentor becomes deeply involved in the mentee’s project. They act as a special companion to the hero in the face of isolation, and, significantly, reveal a tragedy of their own, providing a nexus through which the mentee can access a deeper kind of truth. Not only are they flawed and ordinary people (they are not celebrities within the imagined worlds of the stories) who the mentee must challenge and learn to truly respect, they are “effecting and important” (Maslin) in reminding audiences of those hidden idiosyncrasies that open the barriers to friendship. Mentors in these stories, and many others, communicate themes of class, culture, talent, jealousy, love and loss which inform ideas about the ethical treatment of the ‘other’ (Gadamer). They ultimately prove pivotal to self worth, human confidence and growth. Very little of this thematic substance survives in reality television (see comparison of plots and contrasting modes of human engagement in the example of The Office and Dirty Jobs, Winant 70). Archetypally identifiable as they may be, mean judges and empathetic supermodels as characters are concerned mostly with the embodiment of perfection. They are flawless, untouchable and indeed most powerful when human welfare is at stake, and when the mentee before them faces isolation (see promise to a future ‘Rihanna’, X-Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 1 and Tyra Banks’ Next Top Model tirade at a contestant who had not lived up to her potential, West). If connecting with a mentor in fiction has long signified the importance of understanding of the past, of handing down tradition (Gadamer 354), and of our fascination with the elder, wiser other, then we can see a fundamental shift in narrative representation of mentors in reality television stories. In the past, as we have opened our hearts to such characters, as a facilitator to or companion of the hero, we have rehearsed a sacred respect for the knowledge and fulfillment mentors can provide. In reality television the ‘drama’ may evoke a fleeting rush of excitement at the hero’s success or failure, but the reality belies a pronounced distancing between mentor and mentee. The Creative Class: An Aspirational ParadigmThemes of ascension and potential fulfillment are also central to modern creativity discourse (Runco; Runco 672; United Nations). Seen as the driving force of the 21st century, creativity is now understood as much more than art, capable of bringing economic prosperity (United Nations) and social cohesion to its acme (United Nations xxiii). At the upper end of creative practice, is what Florida called “the creative class: a fast growing, highly educated, and well-paid segment of the workforce” (on whose expertise corporate profits depend), in industries ranging “from technology to entertainment, journalism to finance, high-end manufacturing to the arts” (Florida). Their common ethos is centered on individuality, diversity, and merit; eclipsing previous systems focused on ‘shopping’ and theme park consumerism and social conservatism (Eisinger). While doubts have since been raised about the size (Eisinger) and financial practices (Krätke 838) of the creative class (particularly in America), from an entertainment perspective at least, the class can be seen in full action. Extending to rich housewives, celebrity teen mothers and even eccentric duck hunters and swamp people, the creative class has caught up to the more traditional ‘star’ actor or music artist, and is increasingly marketable within world’s most sought after and expensive media spaces. Often reality celebrities make their mark for being the most outrageous, the cruelest (Peyser), or the weirdest (Gallagher; Peyser) personalities in the spotlight. Aspiring to the creative class thus, is a very public affair in television. Willing participants scamper for positions on shows, particularly those with long running, heavyweight titles such as Big Brother, The Bachelor, Survivor and the Idol series (Hill 35). The better known formats provide high visibility, with the opportunity to perform in front of millions around the globe (Frere-Jones, Day). Tapping into the deeply ingrained upward-mobility rhetoric of America, and of Western society, shows are aided in large part by 24-hour news, social media, the proliferation of celebrity gossip and the successful correlation between pop culture and an entertainment-style democratic ideal. As some have noted, dramatized reality is closely tied to the rise of individualization, and trans-national capitalism (Darling-Wolf 127). Its creative dynamism indeed delivers multi-lateral benefits: audiences believe the road to fame and fortune is always just within reach, consumerism thrives, and, politically, themes of liberty, egalitarianism and freedom ‘provide a cushioning comfort’ (Peyser; Pinter) from the domestic and international ills that would otherwise dispel such optimism. As the trials and tests within the reality genre heighten the seriousness of, and excitement about ascending toward the creative elite, show creators reproduce the same upward-mobility themed narrative across formats all over the world. The artifice is further supported by the festival-like (Grodin 46) symbology of the live audience, mass viewership and the online voting community, which in economic terms, speaks to the creative power of the material. Whether through careful manipulation of extra media space, ‘game strategy’, or other devices, those who break through are even more idolized for the achievement of metamorphosing into a creative hero. For the creative elite however, who wins ‘doesn’t matter much’. Vertical integration is the priority, where the process of making contestants famous is as lucrative as the profits they will earn thereafter; it’s a form of “one-stop shopping” as the makers of Idol put it according to Frere-Jones. Furthermore, as Florida’s measures and indicators suggested, the geographically mobile new creative class is driven by lifestyle values, recreation, participatory culture and diversity. Reality shows are the embodiment this idea of creativity, taking us beyond stale police procedural dramas (Hirschorn) and racially typecast family sitcoms, into a world of possibility. From a social equality perspective, while there has been a notable rise in gay and transgender visibility (Gamson) and stories about lower socio-economic groups – fast food workers and machinists for example – are told in a way they never were before, the extent to which shows actually unhinge traditional power structures is, as scholars have noted (Andrejevic and Colby 197; Schroeder) open to question. As boundaries are nonetheless crossed in the age of neoliberal creativity, the aspirational paradigm of joining a new elite in real life is as potent as ever. Reality Television’s Mentors: How to Understand Their ‘Role’Reality television narratives rely heavily on the juxtaposition between celebrity glamour and comfort, and financial instability. As mentees put it ‘all on the line’, storylines about personal suffering are hyped and molded for maximum emotional impact. In the best case scenarios mentors such as Caitlyn Jenner will help a trans mentee discover their true self by directing them in a celebrity-style photo shoot (see episode featuring Caitlyn and Zeam, Logo TV 2015). In more extreme cases the focus will be on an adopted contestant’s hopes that his birth mother will hear him sing (The X Factor USA, Season 2, Episode 11 Part 1), or on a postal clerk’s fear that elimination will mean she has to go back “to selling stamps” (The X Factor US - Season 2 Episode 11 Part 2). In the entrepreneurship format, as Woodward pointed out, it is not ‘help’ that mentees are given, but condescension. “I have to tell you, my friend, that this is the worst idea I’ve ever heard. You don’t have a clue about how to set up a business or market a product,” Woodward noted as the feedback given by one elite businessman on The Shark Tank (Woodward). “This is a five million dollar contract and I have to know that you can go the distance” (The X Factor US – Season 2 Episode 11, Part 1) Britney Spears warned to a thirteen-year-old contestant before accepting her as part of her team. In each instance the fictitious premise of being either an ‘enabler’ or destroyer of dreams is replayed and slightly adapted for ongoing consumer interest. This lack of shared experience and mutual recognition in reality television also highlights the overt, yet rarely analyzed focus on the wealth of mentors as contrasted with their unstable mentees. In the respective cases of The X Factor and I Am Cait, one of the wealthiest moguls in entertainment, Cowell, reportedly contracts mentors for up to $15 million per season (Nair); Jenner’s performance in I Am Cait was also set to significantly boost the Kardashian empire (reportedly already worth $300 million, Pavia). In both series, significant screen time has been dedicated to showing the mentors in luxurious beachside houses, where mentees may visit. Despite the important social messages embedded in Caitlyn’s story (which no doubt nourishes the Kardashian family’s generally more ersatz material), the question, from a moral point of view becomes: would these mentors still interact with that particular mentee without the money? Regardless, reality participants insist they are fulfilling their dreams when they appear. Despite the preplanning, possibility of distress (Australia Network News; Bleasby) and even suicide (Schuster), as well as the ferocity of opinion surrounding shows (Marche) the parade of a type of ‘road of trials’ (Vogler 189) is enough to keep a huge fan base interested, and hungry for their turn to experience the fortune of being touched by the creative elite; or in narrative terms, a supernatural aid. ConclusionThe key differences between reality television and artistic narrative portrayals of mentors can be found in the use of archetypes for narrative conflict and resolution, in the ways themes are explored and the ways dialogue is put to use, and in the focus on and visibility of material wealth (Frere-Jones; Peyser). These differences highlight the political, cultural and social implications of exchanging stories about potential fulfillment, for stories about ascension to the creative class. Rather than being based on genuine reciprocity, and understanding of human issues, reality shows create drama around the desperation to penetrate the inner sanctum of celebrity fame and fortune. In fiction we see themes based on becoming famous, on gender transformation, and wealth acquisition, such as in the films and series Almost Famous (2000), The Bill Silvers Show (1955-1959), Filthy Rich (1982-1983), and Tootsie (1982), but these stories at least attempt to address a moral question. Critically, in an artistic - rather than commercial context – the actors (who may play mentees) are not at risk of exploitation (Australia Network News; Bleasby; Crouch). Where actors are paid and recognized creatively for their contribution to an artistic work (Rupel), the mentee in reality television has no involvement in the ways action may be set up for maximum voyeuristic enjoyment, or manipulated to enhance scandalous and salacious content which will return show and media profits (“Reality Show Fights”; Skeggs and Wood 64). The emphasis, ironically, from a reality production point of view, is wholly on making the audience believe (Papacharissi and Mendelson 367) that the content is realistic. This perhaps gives some insight as to why themes of personal suffering and instability are increasingly evident across formats.On an ethical level, unlike the knowledge transferred through complex television plots, or in coming of age films (as cited above) about the ways tradition is handed down, and the ways true mentors provide altruistic help in human experience; in reality television we take away the knowledge that life, under neoliberalism, is most remarkable when one is handpicked to undertake a televised journey featuring their desire for upward mobility. The value of the mentoring in these cases is directly proportionate to the financial objectives of the creative elite.ReferencesAggarwal, Sirpa. “WWE, A&E Networks, and Simplynew Share Benefits of White-Label Social TV Solutions at the Social TV Summit.” Arktan 25 July 2012. 1 August 2014 <http://arktan.com/wwe-ae-networks-and-simplynew-share-benefits-of-white-label-social-tv-solutions-at-the-social-tv-summit/>. 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