Re-Envisioning the Artist Hero Through Two Cole Porter Biopics

Songwriter Cole Porter is unusual in having had two biopics based on his life: Night and Day (1946) starring Cary Grant, and De-Lovely (2004), starring Kevin Kline. The differences in the treatment of the character of Cole Porter between the films are striking, and indicate a change in the way that society envisions its artists, and the very act of creativity. Night and Day was conceived partly as a showcase of Porter's songs, but also as a means of providing inspiration to soldiers returning wounded from World War II, based on Porter's recovery from a traumatic riding accident. It depicts Porter as an everyman following a trajectory of achievement, from having little to great success, which was positioned as easy to emulate. De-Lovely, on the other hand, is about the relationship between Porter and his wife Linda, and the way that his creativity was influenced by his changing relationships with various people. Drawing on the work on biopics of scholars such as G.F.Custen, together with research into the shifting ideas of how creativity operates and is popularly understood, this article uses these biopics as case studies to examine the representation of changing concepts of the artist and the act of creativity through Hollywood film. It also considers how these changing conceptions and representations connect to shifts in American society.

"No Artist has Ethical Sympathies": Oscar Wilde, Aesthetics, and Moral Evolution

“There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals” (137). This evolutionary claim is not attributable to Darwin, but to Oscar Wilde, who allows Gilbert to voice this bold assertion in “The True Function of Criticism.” While critics have long wrestled with the ethical stance and coherence of Wilde's writings, they have overlooked a significant influence on his work: debates concerning the evolution of morality that animated the periodicals in which he was writing. Wilde was fascinated by the proposition that complex human behaviours, including moral and aesthetic responses, might be traced back to evolutionary impulses. Significantly, he also wrote for a readership already engaged with these controversies.

Performing Space

This article discusses how the notion of performance provides impetus for the design of interactive digital environments. These environments can ultimately be regarded as user-spaces; a condition which replaces the "fixed" art-object with a configuration of interactions. Our understanding of space, as suggested by Lefevbre (2001), defines the "inhabitant" as a full participant, a user, a performer of space. What is at play when the installation artist designs environments that invite performative exploration? The issue of improvised performance in the inhabiting of installation spaces is exposed. Two interactive installations by the author and works by others in the field provide a context for discussion for discussion and analysis.

The practice of book illustration: Three examples by Norah Borges

This article focuses on three different examples of book illustration carried out by Norah Borges in the 1930s and 1940s (Canciones de mar y tierra by Concha Méndez, Platero y yo by Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Paul et Virginie by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre). Its purpose is twofold: to show how illustrations can shape our reading of texts and to examine how the artist's work can be assimilated to a current of neorromanticismo in Spanish letters dating back to the pre-Civil War period. Her work might serve as an illustration of what Ramón Gómez de la Serna termed the cursi bueno, a marginalized reaction to the dehumanization of art that speaks of sentiment, domesticity and, in women's case, of repressed longing.

Professing translation: the acts-in-between

Drawing on scholarship in translation ethics (Berman 1992; Cronin 2003) and performance studies (Conquergood 2002; Jackson 2004), this article approaches translation in the theatre from the double perspective of theory and practice. Professing translation as a model for the resolution of entrenched binaries (scholar/artist; theoretician/practitioner), the author sees the practice of translating for performance not just as a method of discovery or a hermeneutic tool but also as a mode of reflection that brings together both “readerly” and “writerly” approaches to text (Barthes 1974). By drawing on the experience of writing translations of García Lorca for the Belgrade Theatre, Calderón for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Lope de Vega for the Watermill Theatre and the Washington Shakespeare Theatre, the article attempts to characterise such translation as an act of physical imagination, of a holistic understanding of both language and performance, into which textuality is incorporated and by which it is superseded. © John Benjamins Publishing Company

Rotating Brains / Beating Heart:International collaborative performance with Stelarc, the virtual reality ensemble Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, Pauline Oliveros, Martin Parker and saxophonist Franziska Schroeder.

The work ROTATING BRAINS / BEATING HEART was specifically developed for the opening performance of the 2010 DRHA conference. The conference’s theme ‘Sensual Technologies: Collaborative Practices of Interdisciplinarity explored collaborative relationships between the body and sensual/sensing technologies across various disciplines, looking to new approaches offered by various emerging fields and practices that incorporate new and existing technologies. The conference had a specific focus on SecondLife with roundtable events and discussions, led by performance artist Stelarc, as well as international participation via SecondLife.
The collaboration between Stelarc, the Avatar Orchestra Metaverse (AOM) and myself as the DRHA2010 conference program chair was a unique occurrence for this conference.

History, an Exit Strategy: The Retrofuture Fabulations of kara lynch

A cartographer constructs a map of an individual creative history, that of the American artist kara lynch, as it emerges in connection to a collective history of African American cultural expression. Positioning history as complex, dynamic systems of interwoven memory networks, the map follows lynch’s traversals through various “zones of cultural haunting”: places where collective memories made invisible through systematic processes of cultural erasure may be recovered and revived. Through these traversals, which are inspired by lynch’s “forever project” Invisible, the map covers such terrains as haunted narratives, mechanisms of abstraction and coding within African American media production, water as an informational technology, the distribution of memory in blood, the dialectics of materiality and immateriality that frame considerations of black subjectivity, and the possibility that place of music might not be the site of sound but instead the social production of memory.

Contemporary Radio Art and Spatial Politics: The Critical Radio Utopias of Anna Friz

The article explores the work of the Canadian sound artist Anna Friz over the last decade. Her work deals explicitly with issues of technology and the relative absence of women's voices on radio. Exploring her work as a composer, installation artist, instrumentalist, performance artist and storyteller, and contextualising these practices within feminist critiques and radio conventions, the article explores Friz's ‘self-reflexive radio’. Ideas of ‘supermodernity’, ‘displacement’ and ‘critical utopia’ are deployed to discuss specific pieces of Friz's work in relation to identity and space. The article argues that Friz reconfigures the radio as a site of resistance to dominant constructions of contemporary globalised space and cultures, the politics of informational capitalism and the uneven flows that these cultures and politics engender.