Wrapped fragments : Drapery, the eighteenth century portrait bust and the male subject

The depiction of drapery (generalised cloth as opposed to clothing) is a well-established convention of Neo-Classical sculpture and is often downplayed by art historians as of purely rhetorical value. It can be argued however that sculpted drapery has served a spectrum of expressive ends, the variety and complexity of which are well illustrated by a study of its use in portrait sculpture. For the Neo-Classical portrait bust, drapery had substantial iconographic and political meaning, signifying the new Enlightenment notions of masculine authority. Within the portrait bust, drapery also served highly strategic aesthetic purposes, alleviating the abruptness of the truncated format and the compromising visual consequences of the “cropped” body. With reference to Joseph Nollekens’ portraits of English statesman Charles James Fox and the author’s own sculptural practice, this paper analyses the Neo-Classical use of drapery to propose that rendered fabric, far from mere stylistic flourish, is a highly charged visual signifier with much scope for exploration in contemporary sculptural practice.

The rules of autogeddon : sex death and law in J G Ballard’s Crash

It was reported that the manuscript of Crash was returned to the publisher with a note reading ‘The author is beyond psychiatric help’. Ballard took the lay diagnosis as proof of complete artistic success. Crash conflates the Freudian tropes of libido and thanatos, overlaying these onto the twentieth century erotic icon, the car. Beyond mere incompetent adolescent copulatory fumblings in the back seat of the parental sedan or the clichéd phallic locomotor of the mid-life Ferrari, Ballard engages the full potentialities of the automobile as the locus and sine qua non of a perverse, though functional erotic. ‘Autoeroticism’ is transformed into automotive, traumatic or surgical paraphilia, driving Helmut Newton’s insipid photo-essays of BDSM and orthopædics into an entirely new dimension, dancing precisely where (but more crucially, because) the ‘body is bruised to pleasure soul’. The serendipity of quotidian accidental collisions is supplanted, in pursuit of the fetishised object, by contrived (though not simulated) recreations of iconographic celebrity deaths. Penetration remains as a guiding trope of sexuality, but it is confounded by a perversity of focus. Such an obsessive pursuit of this autoerotic-as-reality necessitates the rejection of the law of human sexual regulation, requiring the re-interpretation of what constitutes sex itself by looking beyond or through conventional sexuality into Ballard’s paraphiliac and nightmarish consensual Other. This Other allows for (if not demands) the tangled wreckage of a sportscar to function as a transformative sexual agent, creating, of woman, a being of ‘free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts, all the deviant possibilities of her sex’.

Delivery

'Delivery' (2005) was an installation work at MetroArts, Brisbane that incorporated drawings, paintings, video projections and temporary architectural structures. The work made central use out of a mock public event, staged in a Gold Coast park by the artist. Documentary footage of the ambiguous event comprised one of the video projections and formed the basic iconographic palette upon which the rest of the works were based. Using 3D animation as well as conventional drawing and paintign approaches, the works conveyed a palpable sense of fragmentation and social dislocation - a quality that was heightened by the reflective panels that bisected the exhibition space. The work was [part of the MetroArts Artistic Program in 2005 and its video elements were included in the 2008 exhibition Video Ground, curated by Rachel O'Reilly for Multimedia Art Asia Pacific (MAAP)/Bangkok Experimental Film Festival (Touring show). The work was the subject of a feature article by Mark Pennings in Eyeline magazine, and also appeared on the front cover of that issue.

Cultural politics and iconography : an introduction

This collection of papers reflects on the many dimensions of contemporary narratives of iconography in public culture in Australia and Asia. The idea for the volume arose from a series of seminars held at the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research in 2002. The series ‘Iconographies’ was convened by Penny Edwards and centred on research undertaken in the Asia-Pacific, with papers that interrogated national and cultural icons. Just as a biography might examine the makings of a particular personality and her or his shaping of inner and outer worlds, so also iconographic narratives that trace and explore both the evolution and appropriation of particular icons help us mark key moments in the cultural politics of communities, nations and global public spheres. The present volume has two papers (Taylor and Seth) from that series and others on the themes of iconography and iconoclasm that were solicited from a group of interdisciplinary authors working on these themes.