Visual Art

This essay explores two themes played out in Ciro Guerra's 2015 film Embrace of the Serpent, one being: the symbolic madness as a representation of manic corruption or irreconcilable loss between civilisations, and conversely the spiritual imaginary that overrides otherness. Both themes diagnose a moral ambiguity in the narrative demonstrating a subversive representation around post-colonial issues. Furthermore I will examine D.Berghahn's case study on the film regarding cosmopolitanism and exoticism to preface a conjecture on how themes-that subvert problematic representation-might be supressed or brought forward in cinema styles dealing with post-colonial subjects.

This essay argues for a movement to converge theoretical communication with poetic communication. The difference is that one mode has a feedback loop while the other does not (communication theory). The inquiry looks at the advent of contemporary cinema practices in Audio-Visual essays as one site grappling with hybrid theoretical/poetic texts.

" Twilight is vague, all outlines are confused; only eyes sharpened by a will to discover the primal and invisible signs of things and beings can find a bearing through the misty vision of the anima mundi. However, the sixth art imposes itself on the unquiet and scrutinous spirit." Ricciotto Canudo-The Birth Of The Sixth Art 1911 "Last night I was in the Kingdom of shadows. If you only knew how strange it is to be there, it is a world without sound without colour. Everything there-the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air-is dipped in monotonous grey" Maxim Gorky (Nizhny-Novgorod, 1896) This essay examines The Lighthouse (Robert Eggers 2019) as an allegory of psychosis that is invocated by the pre-cinematic technology of the lighthouse-the keepers as predecessors of projectionists. The film explores an epistemological transgression of the human relationship to nature at the crossroads of the romantic sublime 1 and industrial modernity. Considering Bazin's Ontology of the photographic image as a process that makes the modern world and history visible through its automatic realism and indexicality-I will argue that The lighthouse through its stylistic realism explores a dark ontology; that is making visible the hidden signs caused by the photographic/cinematic apparatus. Finally I will examine why this filmic style/realism adopted by Eggers seeks to uncover early cinematic affects in light of contemporary digital media and its ontological condition.

Can curation make visible the invisible relations that constitute heterogeneous cultural objects, such objects that are divorced from their origins in a post-modern condition?

Jameson argues that the postmodern registers a break in the signifying chain, a late stage of modernity that divorces cultural meanings from their surfaces. Take Princes films Purple Rain (Albert Magnoli 1984) that is in itself a spectacle of indulgence to the registers of post-modernism that Jameson outlines – but within this spectacle are genuine references to social realism or a symbol of curation (tantamount to the mythology of artistic genius), being the virtues of Princes character, who peforms in the meta-narrative of his own music career. The issue for Jameson is how can we reconcile the dissolution and assimilation of cultural objects (a schizophrenic break) into something meaningful like the liberation of ideology. In this instance we must decipher the relations between signs and judge – does this collage make a dead end even if it’s a pretty one or is there a hybridity here that is transformative. Can collage be critical act? The way we have to process this stuff is maybe we are blind to the hybrid form of multiple signs like a gestalt. The German term for pop art was capitalist realism  as in commodification (generating the fragmentation of cultural meanings) is in itself revealing its own collage and concealing it – the collage or its advanced form curation can be a tactic for uncovering these forms generating new political agency. In Purple Rain prince has adopted various cultural vessels (bikie outlaw, libertine attire, cheetah skin guitar strap) these surfaces form his identity, a kind of armour for escaping a social code. The most paradoxical melancholy/transcendence of Purple Rain is the meaning itself of this song, in an interview on the meaning prince says "When there's blood in the sky – red and blue = purple... purple rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/god guide you through the purple rain”  – for prince God is not dead but re-emerges through a most basic synthesis of signs, his love for his dad remains in light of a broken family unit. Subjectivity in the form of love is returned to a collage of signs, but is it that faith in itself stands for the abscense of god?

"Cry the dead artists out of the living past, our songs will be silenced, but what of it?, go on singing-maybe a mans name doesn't matter all that much" Orson Welles-F For Fake 1973 This essay examines recent methodological practices of open textuality in film scholarship and how these modes of inquiry are reflected in recent Hollywood cinema. Specifically these practices seek to address knowledge surrounding historical films texts but also how films remain open to contemporary theoretical investigation i.e. climate change, human technological dynamics. I will address three modes of this intertextual turn they are: Media Archaeology by Thomas Elsaesser, Buster Keaton's Climate Change by Jennifer Faye and the film Hail Ceaser (Cohen Brothers 2016). In convergence these new methods of research and practice suggest a dynamic historiography in which media artifacts of the past are transformative I will argue that this tendency moves away from digital nostalgia, being the contemporary impasse of future thinking. Open Textuality and Cinema Although historically film theory has embraced many methodological modes of engaging cinema texts, the problem that Deleuze identified is that we presume the film text to find its meaning by us making it the object of theory. He makes the distinction that "cinemas concepts are not given in cinema, and yet they are cinemas concepts, not theories about cinema" 1. By this he means the cinema thinks and gives rise to its own concepts that are distinctive to the medium, the theoretical inclination to address cinema is to realise a theoretical approach that is a shared constrction of thought. In this sense we can address the cinematic text as an open form in proximity to the site of its construction and the movements of its afterlife. 1 Deleze, Giles"The Time image" Cinema 2, University of Minnesota Press, 1989.pg 280.

Contemporary digital Screens are the architectural portals of digital networks they allow us access to the network but also the screen supersedes the mirror in the sense that we see ourselves in the network through screens, our reflection becomes code. The Netflix TVseries Black mirror (C Brooker 2011) explores this alienation and paradox of us being integrated into a network of screens-the mirror is black because as the screen is idle or off it is capable of still recording or being on, by virtue of the network we are not only reflected but looked at. The screen embodies the process of digitalisation, that is capture-storage-process and this immanence occurs beyond comprehension much like a camouflage. The moving image exists through the phenomena of sequencing 24 frames per second 1 in continuum but the standard projection or in digital screens is 60 fps, so half the screen time is darkness. The philosopher Ted Coless calls this the secret stratum of the cinematic image… unconscious darkness 2. So paradoxically the screen illuminates itself as a connection to a network that extends beyond us seeing, the cloud means the network, and in duality mirrors a darkness that which cannot be seen but is none the less present. In Sean Cubbit's terms the ubiquity and formative code of digital screens not only determines our relation to the network 3 (raster-grid, compression formulas) but conceals like darkness the ecological, economic and material effects of its existence. Wk2 Techno-ghost and de-naturalisation The film ghost in the shell examines the ontological relationship a post-human AI has in relation to the world that she has emerged from. Her coming into being is a product of two 1 There are variations on this standard but they are all dependent on the spectator not seeing the frames in isolation, i.e. 2 E.Colless, T. (2018) Transimage 2018 | keynote 1-Edward Colless, https://vimeo.com/273673295, 2018. 3 Cubitt, Sean (2011) Current screens. In, Grau, Oliver and Veigl, Thomas (eds.) Imagery in the 21st Century. USA. MIT Press, pp. 21-35.

500words paper submission for Perspectives in Art & Cultural Theory 2 part of the Master of Contemporary Art course at the VCA (lecturer N.Loeffler).

Taking the medium specific term to a more abstract level entails the clarification of what has come before, the death of previous definitions, and contemporary applications of the same discipline to existent and variable art forms.

Housed in the National Gallery of Australia in the Decorative Arts and Design Collection, Surge 16 (see fig.1) is a work in glass that embodies a rare combination of styles, processes and effects within its single form. The piece, that belongs to the stringent and scientific creative discipline of Glass Art (or ‘Studio Glass’), relays a narrative captured within materials and processes, and yet one that attracts multiple sociological, ecological, and institutional queries due to its potential ability to truly break free from the very genre from which it originates - and due to its unique craftsmanship. The work is a 2011 creation that belongs to a series of works under the same (numbered) title spanning from 2008 to present day, 2016. It is a work of immense subtlety and yet is visceral, full of energy and movement. It is a temporal work that is frozen in transit from one process to another, and to another again, and is highly reflective of the medium and the materiality of glass while acknowledging the tradition for which the genre stands. The work is very beautiful – even sensual – and while sparkling like a diamond it is, nonetheless, a precariously fragile and dangerous object to come close to. Surge 16 is ultimately an illusory object that, while restrained both physically in its display, and dialectically in its minimalist background narrative, its simple success ignites discussions of investigation into territories unchartered and highly guarded; it is a work that relates as directly to nature and the environment as to nostalgia and romanticism; a work that makes claims to no conceptual territory and yet is seemingly able to belong to many, simply by the recognition it receives and the gradual impact it is making.

A Look at the installation work 'Spiral Incense Bardo' from Charwei Tsai (Taiwan) at the 20 th Sydney Biennale, and what voice this may provoke in the larger curatorial discussion. I myself am not a spiritualist in the sense that I respect spirituality, and do not use it as a crux-theme or as a fad for some sort of esoteric keychain into a new and refreshed dimension of superior well-being and innocence. I am also not a Buddhist. However, I have and still do practice (i.e. meditate after strict training program), which if anything means that I am a lived and jaded human being as any other and rather than swallow it and keep looking for the next best thing – the next distracting 'solution' – I have insisted on putting my life on pause for a period in an effort to pay attention; to repair; to turn off the noise, and to focus on non-focus. The essence of the most diminutive symbols then become things of recognition, then distance, and then subject of non-affect. The stillness of emptiness, perhaps one can say, stems from a philosophy closer to Eastern Buddhist tradition than any other accurate source. It is also paralleled in equally valid context in the work and writings of Heidegger and Wittgenstein-both philosophers who have borrowed from Pali scriptures and from Japanese Zen Buddhist writings respectively. (To those that have read some eastern texts, these – not unconstructive influences-are quite apparent and the exchange is seemingly amicable). Part of this conceptual 'subscription' to the stillness of emptiness is the recognition of silence, and of emotive flux in reaction to a space or a work of art. A finer receptivity to sensations that begins within. To allow that reaction to simmer and dissipate enables one to enjoy and immerse that given space in a 'purer' state, uncorrupted and non-reactionary: "it has to do with issues that lie beneath the material, with fact that materials are there to make something else possible... The things that are available, or the non-physical things, the intellectual things, the possibilities that are available through the material" says Homi K. Bhabha of another well-known artist originally from the East. i On entering Charwei Tsai's installation at Mortuary Station, the ability to do this is simply magnified and made easier, and the amount of mental noise, thoughts and distractions clears quite instantly to a level of clarity and coherence toward an understanding of something not yet defined. Reflection upon geometric contrast between the circular forms of the gigantic burning coil incense and the small detailed angular motifs of floor-tiling appear more succinct in a juxtaposed balance-itself an intervention of aesthetics. The smell emanating from the coils, one of a unique neutrality far far removed from the researched frangipani or common herbal scents, carries no familiarities nor triggers reminisce. Then there is the silence on the platform. The background noise from traffic beyond literally subsides. The Embassy of Transitions is a space of sensorial 'subversion'. A subversion of material noise (even the invigilators' tones of instruction and guidance seem to reduce to a hushed silence upon entry). Likewise, a subversion of inner noise; a tonal variance only usually achieved via a truly utopian environment or a place of meditation. Once remarked, there are few places to go but to observe and consume moment by moment.

The portmanteau ‘transpondence’ is intended to transcend its raw sub-form elements and portray this merge as a tool – a tool for expression, as one would a drill or a hammer, a feather or a sword, hence it’s pre-occupation with terms of disposition rather than actions – medium as it were over fundamental subjective matter. The refuse of adjuncts and half words, multi-faceted synonyms, reverberated contexts, tonal and atonal nuance, apparatuses that traverse segues of definition all impact how ethereal or literal its interpretation is perceived. It is an invitation to respond, to replay, to negotiate an answer, to ping pong and to use any means present or assigned to do so. A reference to our daily behaviour and communication methods is intended; a characteristic of crisis within utopia is suggested and analogies to shifts in societal condition are an undeniable pillar in the construction of its terminology.