Enchanting David Bowie space/time/body/memory

This exciting collection is organized according to the key themes of space, time, body, and memory - themes that literally and metaphorically address the key questions and intensities of his output.

The whiteness of David Bowie

During the 1980s, in particular, Bowie embodied particular notions of white masculinity that were on the one hand supportive of its idealized hegemony, and on the other subverted its normative power. I will take 1983 as the year when his whiteness is particularly visible and unstable. Bowie, as either the blonde dandy from Let’s Dance; the enigmatic character, Maj. Jack 'Strafer' Celliers from Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence (1983); or the simmering vampire, John Blaylock from The Hunger (1983), crystlised the pure qualities of white masculinity while demonstrating its violent, queer and subversive nature. The chapter will suggest that Bowie has constantly operated along a white continuum, self-consciously embodying it, granting it carnal and ideological power, while drawing attention to its death-like instinct, its anti-reproductive progeny, its implicit queerness.I have chosen to read Bowie’s whiteness through this shortened window of temporality to enable me to draw into the analysis the historical and cultural issues of the period in question. 1983 registers as the year in which whiteness is acutely imagined to be under threat from the Asian tiger and transforming geo-political realities, its own languid anti-corporeality, the AIDS ‘epidemic’, and from the rise of racism in Europe and elsewhere - realities which require it to re-position its power relations with the sexual, and ethnic Other. The whiteness in/of David Bowie speaks particularly eloquently to this historical moment.

One minute's silence by David Metzenthen and Michael Camilleri

Deakin University Library hosted the awarding winning author and illustrator event. Author David Metzenthen and illustrator Michael Camilleri spoke about their award-winning picture book One Minute's Silence, published by Allen and Unwin.

David and Michael discussed their creative inspirations, and how this original and contemporary work came about.

David Cross in conversation with Cameron Bishop

We live in denial of the foreigner within due to the (often feigned) dexterous self-regard we bring to our social and spatial encounters. You, as the literal foreign body in your own work, inviting the participant to pump, breath, hold, slide or catch, deny that self-assurance, not only to the viewer but also to yourself. Framed at a psychosocial level the denial of the foreigner within plays out in all kinds of ways in our treatment of those others who are seen to breach our borders, at a personal, political and national level. The work you create, in this context, may be seen as an interrogation of the western subject’s conventional experience of territories, from the body, to the museum and to the nation. As you suggest, the physical and cognitive thresholds you give to the participant invite the unguarded moment, the other side of which prompts the viewer to ponder their physical relations to others, as fragmented, fragile beings. But key to this is you, the artist, who presents as partial and foreign inside these objects. How are these objects extensions of your own body, and your own athleticism?