Stephen Procter: reflections of a glass artist

Stephen Procter: Reflections of a Glass Artist, records the thoughts and philosophies of the artist and glassmaker who for a number of years headed the Glass Department of the Australian National University School of Art. It traces his career in glass working from his first interest developed through a pointillist technique while living on Dartmoor; through his British Council-funded grant that enabled him to learn glass blowing and cutting techniques in Austria; to the mature landscape paintings and glass sculptures created during his years living in Australia.

Kristevan aesthetics, performativity and the production of situated knowledge

In this paper, I will draw on the work of Julia Kristeva to argue that performativity can be understood in terms of a materialist ontology that underpins creative production and the knowing subject. To understand this, we need to examine the relationship between individual history, biology and culture and processes through which creative practice attributes value by translating psychic representations of affect and drive into verbal and visual signs. Kristeva's aesthetics does not plunge us into an obscure metaphysics, but provides a model for articulating material-discursive practices that emerge from corporeal responses. Enactments, predicated by desire give rise to agency and judgement allowing practice to test theory through the production of situated knowledge.

Kristeva's psychoanalytical position reveals the necessity of linking material and individual practices of art with the social through language and interpretation. Material-discursive practices can only acquire meaning through their relationship between the speaking subject and addressees. Art itself provides us with the means for discovering the knowledge it produces. In and through material practice, the work of art is capable of transferring back to the artist as viewer, structures of meaning that have hitherto been hidden. In practice, this involves a constant movement between the biological self (the self as 'other') and the social self, the ego. In artistic research, it can be said that the first addressee is the artist her/himself, as social other. Constant movement between the two in creative practice can thus be understood as a performative production of knowledge.

Holocaust literature : an exploration of second-generation publication in Australia

Normally we expect the magic of art to intensify, transfigure and elevate actuality. Touch the Holocaust and the flow is reversed (Clendinnen 1998, p. 185). This dissertation explores the relationships between the second-generation Holocaust writer, the Australian publishing industry and the reading public. It contends that a confluence of elements has made the 'genre' of second-generation Holocaust writing publishable in the late 20th century in a way that would not seem obvious from its major themes and the risk-averse publishing strategies increasingly adopted by the multinational conglomerates controlling the Australian industry. The research explores the nature of connections between writing, publishing and reading Holocaust literature, seeking to answer the following questions: What are the driving forces that compel children of Holocaust survivors to write about their parents' lives and their own experiences of growing up in a 'survivor' family? By what mechanisms are such stories published in an Australian industry dominated by international conglomerates focused on mass-market publishing? How do readers receive and make sense of this material?

Representing experience : changing audience relationships in contemporary art

By practice and research this exegesis includes the audience in the making of art, by using the responses of others that inhabit the artwork. It also establishes 'not-knowing' as a methodology to examine changing relationships to audience in contemporary visual arts.

Lost in space

This thesis aims to map current issues and concerns of the exhibition process which produce inequities or shortcomings within the information network. These issues are related to the National Gallery of Victoria's stated aims and objectives.

Subjects and expressive worlds in the work of Merleau-Ponty

Examines Merleau-Ponty's claim that the relationship between subjects, world and others is one of interdependence. Questions traditional accounts of subjectivity based on dichotomous schemas and expands into the expressive domains of art, language and sexuality. Gives some forward-looking reflections as regards ethics arising out of Merleau-Ponty's new ontology.

The cosmos and the camera

As the Findings exhibition was based on the artist's research, the image caption reflects Daniel's core thesis questions, i.e."in what ways can astronomical imaging invoke a phenomenological experience for the viewer?"
All of the wall works were digital prints/photographic images of various sizes.There was also a short looped video playing opposite them. The lettering on the wall was vinyl.

Beyond

Using the metaphor of transcendence in his work Beyond, Daniel Armstrong takes us to other-worldly experiences via the anecdotal behaviours of people using a telescope. Each person looking into the telescope reveals more about themselves through their physical viewing behaviours than the universe they are attempting to look at or into. Armstrong’s work examines that infi nite and unsettled space between the ‘here and now’ and the ‘what might be out there’.

Knowing in, through and about : the PhD journey

This study involves an account of the factors leading to the development and evolution of three public art spaces concerned with contemporary art in the 1980s in Melbourne. The three spaces – Heide Park and Art Gallery, 200 Gertrude Street, and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art developed programs that promoted and presented contemporary art throughout the eighties. Prior to the 1980s the National Gallery of Victoria was the major public institution concerned with the promotion and presentation of contemporary art in Melbourne.

The study describes and analyses events leading to the establishment of each new space and investigates the formations and groups who played leading roles. A case study approach has been used which explores the networks and groupings that developed in setting up and maintaining each space. Theoretical perspectives drawn from Bourdieu, Williams and Wolff are employed in order to explore the social and cultural meanings of the networks and groups responsible for developing the three art spaces. These perspectives are used to help account for the motives and ideology employed by individuals and groups, such as artists, academics and politicians.

Each of the three spaces mainly developed from different clusters and groups, although some individuals had involvement in more than one of the spaces. The study concludes with a cultural analysis that identifies several key factors, such as forms of patronage, government policy direction and the power and influence of various sectors and formations. Government funding for art is a complex area of activity that draws upon a wide constituency of individuals and agents that include artists, wealthy business people, collectors, and so on. The study reveals much about government intervention and cultural and social formations promoting art in Melbourne during the 1980s.

'Hidden differences : new meanings in adaptations of literature to the screen'

Approaches to screen adaptation which either accept or reject 'fidelity' effectively hide from view the interrelations of difference that can be observed between literary and visual works of art. Further, comparative reading of a literary precursor and its screen adaptation alone hides from view the interrelations of difference between those and other works. By focussing on difference, screen adaptations can be viewed and read together with literary precursors and other intertextual influences to produce new stories that would otherwise remain hidden. This method of textual analysis, 'differential reading', is explained by reference to three screen adaptations, clustered around themes of unrequited love and rejection, which illustrate general insights into theoretical issues. When viewed and read together, differences can be observed between these works which produce new meanings. When one switches between the possibilities such new meanings create, views of the world embedded in the respective works are destabilised.

Seeing as believing – or is it?

This article explores aspects of the life and art of the Australian artist Arnold Shore, the subject of my recently published book Arnold Shore – Pioneer Modernist, Macmillan Art Publishing, 2009. The pantheon of Australian art history celebrates particular artists and their visual output. These designated artists become the celebrated and orthodox names, who are seen as defining specific cultural and historical moments. Arnold Shore is cursorily acknowledged in many Australian art history accounts, most often for his teaching at the modernist school he co-founded in 1932, The Bell – Shore School. Much about his art and life remains hidden with the National Gallery of Victoria owning thirteen of his works, none of which are on display. Whilst suggesting there are specific reasons for Shore`s place in art history not being fully acknowledged, the article further investigates why some artists are consigned to a peripheral role, only for their significance and importance to be re-discovered at a later date after historical revisionism. Why is this so? Who are the tastemakers and gatekeepers that actively suppress artists stories and their contributions from receiving wider currency? What factors potentially conspire to obscure or push aside one group to the detriment of others? These questions are increasingly prescient in the twenty-first century as globalisation and spectacle capitalism, compete with representative historical perspectives; issues raised in the latter part of the article.

Alchemy & ambiguity : poetic responses to visual art, primarily portraiture

The author critiques the contemporary definition of poetry responding to art (the verbal representation of visual representation), and shows that this process is unstable and introduces changes, and by this means the visual work of art and the poem complement each other to influence the viewer/reader to produce new meanings.