Carney, Rebecca

‘The Lily in Minoan Art: An Emblem of Power’.

MA, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (Elizabeth Pemberton.)

The lily is one of the most popular motifs in Minoan art, and is found in all art forms from MMII onwards. Although the motif takes a variety of forms-fleur-de-lys, natural lily, waz-lily and lily chain–it is always recognisable by the presence of two downward curving petals. Both the consistency and the extensive use of the lily motif indicate its importance. The lily, like other floral motifs, has hitherto been examined in iconographic terms. Sir Arthur Evans argued in 1902, mainly on the basis of its presence in a Mycenaean ring, that the lily had a religious significance. Many historians since have followed Evans in arguing that the significance of the motif is religious, but other interpretations are possible. By making a comparative analysis of examples of the motif in various media, this thesis demonstrates that the lily motif had a bureaucratic as well as a religious meaning. The motif is found most consistently at Knossos, in seals, pottery, larnakes, gold rings, faience items, and frescoes, and in a stone lamp and in a bronze bowl from the North-West treasury. A study of the instances of the motif in glyptic art demonstrates that the lily has significance as a bureaucratic symbol, while its presence on pottery and larnakes can also be understood as symbols of Knossian authority. An examination of the wall paintings further suggests that those in authority may have employed the lily propagandistically as a symbol of their power.

Piscioneri, Vincenzo James

‘Word and Image: A Study of Dutch Engraving on Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Glass in the Collection of the National Gallery of Victoria’.

MA, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (Geoffrey Edwards.)

This thesis is a study of the collection of Dutch engraved glass of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the National Gallery of Victoria. It examines glass manufactured in the Netherlands and glass imported from England for the purpose of engraving. The first two chapters consider the history of European glass and the history of engraving on glass using the diamond point and the wheel. The third chapter examines the way northern European humanism informed the practice of inscribing text onto the surface of the glass. The fourth chapter examines images engraved on glass and the ways in which politics and society influenced its subject matter. The fifth chapter examines stipple engraving, a technique only practised in the Northern Provinces of the Netherlands during the eighteenth century. The provenance (when known) and literature on each piece is provided. All pieces in the collection as well as comparative works are illustrated.

Russell, Susan May

‘The Fresco Friezes of Palazzo Pamphili in Piazza Navona, Rome’.

PhD, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (David Marshall.)

This thesis is an account of the style, iconography, dating, attribution and patronage of the seventeenth-century fresco friezes in the Palazzo Pamphili in Piazza Navona. It begins by surveying the history of the painted frieze in Rome from the pre-Christian era to the 1630s. The fresco frieze was a significant genre of decoration for the interiors of buildings in Rome, and in the sixteenth century became the major form of decoration for palaces of the Roman nobility and an important conduit for the narrative and heraldic information necessary to a family’s prestige and social status. After 1560 the requirements of the Catholic Reform and theoretical texts such as G.B. Armenini’s treatise On the True Precepts of Painting influenced developments in both style and subject, including moralising messages that would contain meanings specific to the patron. In addition, the genre of landscape became a popular subject for friezes and could be utilised to express spiritual ideals.

The thesis then turns to the Palazzo Pamphili in Piazza Navona, where Giambattista Pamphili commissioned ten narrative fresco friezes in two phases, initially to mark his promotion to cardinal (1629), then to celebrate his ascendancy to the papal throne as Innocent X (1644—1655). Little has been written about the decorative programme and this thesis seeks to explain why Rome’s leading patron adopted the supposedly ‘old-fashioned’ frieze when a more ‘modern’ form of decoration, the illusionistically painted barrel-vaulted ceiling, had been chosen by Innocent’s predecessor, Urban VIII Barberini (1623—1644) for his family palace, the Palazzo Barberini.

Landscape is the dominant genre in the three rooms of the east wing of the old Palazzo Pamphili (c.1630—1635), which is an important reflection of the patron’s taste both as connoisseur and Counter-Reformation cardinal. In these rooms, frescoed by Agostino Tassi and his circle, themes of Justice and Charity are established. Two new attributions are made for works in the Sala di Mosè (Marco Tullio Montagna) and the Sala di Giuseppe (Herman van Swanevelt). An analysis of the four fresco friezes painted during the enlargement of the palace from c.1645—1650 (Andrea Camassei’s Sala di Bacco; Gaspard Dughet’s Sala dei paesi; Giacinto Gimignani’s Sala della storia romana and Giacinto Brandi’s Sala di Ovidio), demonstrates that the landscape genre assisted in establishing the theme of a new Pamphili Golden Age, informed by virtue and Christian militancy, and that classical Roman sources, both visual and literary, emphasised the longevity and authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Donna Olimpia Maidalchini Pamphili, the pope’s sister-in-law, is shown to have been a significant force in the supervision of the building and decorative programmes, and the role of the artist most closely associated with her, Andrea Camassei, is re-evaluated. In the west wing of the palace, painted c.1644—50, the landscape genre once more demonstrates the consistency of Pamphili taste, and an attribution to Giovanni Francesco Grimaldi is proposed. The Pope’s important alliance with Poland is recalled in the Camera degli orientali where the presence of Giovanni Antonio Galli (Lo Spadarino) and Pier Francesco Mola is proposed. Themes of Virtue and Justice are again emphasised in the Camera delle donne illustri which, because of the Old Testament heroines depicted and the dominating presence of Maidalchini heraldry, is identified as Donna Olimpia’s audience room.

It is concluded that the frieze, unrivalled in its story-telling abilities, was an economical and flexible form, capable of considerable variety and development. Most significantly for the Pamphili, the frieze’s decorum differed from the overt displays of wealth and power made by the decorations at Palazzo Barberini. With its impeccable classical derivation, together with the classical aesthetic adopted by the Pamphili artists, the frieze was supremely apt to the dignity of a family who claimed descent from Venus herself and whose status and pretensions were inextricably bound up with the institutions and history of Rome.

Hay, Judith Evelyn

‘A Modern Art Journal: The Portfolio 1870—1874’.

MA, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (Alison Inglis.)

The Portfolio, an elegant art journal founded in 1870 by Philip Gilbert Hamerton, has never been accorded its proper place in either the history of nineteenth-century art or of art journalism. In the years 1870 to 1874 its mild editorial voice masked a carefully constructed editorial programme that was both radical and ambitious in its scope. While its promotion of English etching has been acknowledged, the Portfolio’s other achievements have been overlooked. At a time when English art had seemingly lost its direction, the Portfolio set out to educate a new generation of middle class readers to a finer appreciation of the most promising artistic talent of the period. The artists singled out, with unerring judgement, by the Portfolio, such as G.F. Watts, Frederic Leighton, Simeon Solomon, Edward Burne-Jones and Albert Moore, would later become the leading exponents of Aestheticism.

Walker, Tania

‘Return to the Figurative. Kazimir Malevich’s Late Paintings: 1927—1935’.

MA, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (Roger Benjamin, Christopher McAuliffe.)

Kazimir Malevich is widely recognised as one of the founding figures of Modernism in painting, yet his later works, in particular the series of portraits painted in his last years, have long been the subject of controversy. Politically-minded commentators, exemplified by Benjamin Buchloh, have argued that the late works represent a capitulation, shared by the artists of the avant-garde at large, to the new political orthodoxies of post-Great War Europe.

Malevich and other artists certainly suffered from the ideological demands of the State in the transition from Tsarism, by way of the October Revolution, to the Stalinist dictatorship of the thirties. In Malevich’s case however, close attention to the work of the artist, and in particular to the relationship between his theoretical writings and his painted oeuvre, reveals a consistent path of artistic endeavour. Throughout his writings–both published works on art theory and personal correspondence–Malevich insists on the primacy of ‘painterly realism’, a term he defines as the true expression of the inner, spiritual experience of the artist in response to both material phenomena and the socio-political changes brought about by evolutionary or revolutionary shifts in human consciousness. He explicitly casts the artist in the role of spiritual prophet, and passionately argues for the role of the work of art as a conduit leading the observer toward the experience of a cosmic, spiritual dimension. Thus the ubiquitous, traditional iconic art of Russian Orthodoxy is both a recurring influence and a conscious referent.

Following the creative flowering of Suprematism, Malevich stopped painting. His theoretical and teaching work, however, continued to manifest his search for the essence of ‘painterly realism’, and he maintained his conviction that art retained the potential to be a doorway to a greater reality. When in 1927 he began to paint once more for exhibition, the device of backdating his new works, while providing him with some protection from the very real dangers of the political climate, served also to articulate the thematic continuity of his artistic aim: to create ‘an iconic image’ capable of expressing the new, contemporary, and future-oriented consciousness of Europe.

Although at the end of his Suprematist period he had come to believe that there was no further role for painting, Malevich continued to maintain a high degree of respect for the Old Masters and to seek out, in his research and teaching, the essence of their contribution. He came to believe that it was precisely in their realisation of ‘painterly realism’ that the greatness of these masters consisted, and he developed a complex theory in which the specific contribution of each was defined as a particular, new painterly element.

Thus in the final portraits, painted during his last illness, Malevich attempted to encapsulate, through a combination of historical references, allegory, and the integration of Suprematist motifs, a truly contemporary model of painterly art: one cognisant of tradition, but transformed in the context of the new consciousness, and pointing to the potential of the new man in whose future he continued to believe, despite the unhappy derailment of the revolutionary ideal by politics.

Eckfeld, Tonia

‘The Tomb of Li Xian: Posthumous Rehabilitatiuon and Political Legitimacy’.

PhD, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (David Marshall, Li Liu, William Coaldrake.)

Li Xian (Crown Prince Zhanghuai, 654—684), son of Emperor Gaozong and Empress Wu Zetian, was publicly disgraced, demoted and died in exile where his body was buried in a commoner’s grave. More than twenty years later, under Emperor Zhongzong’s orders, his body was returned to the capital, Chang’an, and given a high status burial in a grand tomb within the Qianling royal necropolis. Subsequently Emperor Ruizong upgraded Li Xian’s posthumous rank and title, the tomb was improved and the body of Li Xian’s historical wife was interred there. This study is a detailed examination of the tomb’s location, form and mural paintings in terms of early eighth-century mortuary practices and the historical and political circumstances of the Wu Zetian and post-Wu Zetian periods. This thesis argues that Li Xian’s tomb served ritual and symbolic purposes for the benefit of both the living and the deceased. It argues that Li Xian’s burial at the Qianling imperial mausoleum complex contributed to his posthumous rehabilitation by publicly demonstrating his reaffiliation to the royal family and honouring his memory as a venerable ancestor. The form and decoration of Li Xian’s tomb reinstated the entitlements appropriate to his princely rank, thereby tacitly restoring not only Li Xian’s social standing, albeit posthumously, but also that of his surviving family. The tomb was constructed in the form of a luxurious underground palace and estate supplied with those elements of a prince’s palace necessary to make it a suitable place for the contented occupancy of Li Xian’s soul in perpetuity. An analysis of Li Xian’s 711 epitaph tablet inscription establishes that the pictorial program of the tomb represents a paradise that was conceived in secular terms. It is argued that, along with a number of other select reinterments, Li Xian’s tomb was a potent political symbol asserting Li family ascendancy and the glorification of the newly restored Tang regime. Li Xian’s tomb was of extraordinarily high status, yet lower than that of Crown Prince Yide or Princess Yongtai, also built at the Qianling complex in 705 to 706 under Zhongzong’s orders. Comparison of Li Xian’s tomb with these and others clarifies the Tang use of tomb typology and the hierarchical system of mortuary entitlements to delineate subtle degrees of elevated status, and highlights the ways in which tombs were used by the ruling elite for the legitimisation of political authority in the late seventh and early eighth centuries.

Jackson, Simon

‘The Discipline without a Name: a History of Industrial Design in Australia, with Particular Reference to the Period 1930 to 1975’.

PhD, Monash University, Visual Culture Section, School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies, 1999. (Conrad Hamann.)

This thesis constructs a history of the transformation of industrial design in Australia from a ‘discipline which has no name’ into a distinct profession. Two sub-narratives are explored: the mythology of industrial design in Australia and its relationship with Australian national identity, and Australia’s relationships with the world’s industrial design centres.

Despite its lack of identity, some form of design for industry was important for the emerging industries of nineteenth-century Australia. Agricultural implements were ‘invented’–that is, were the products of industrial design–in response to the needs of a people isolated from Britain and Europe and faced with different circumstances. Such industrial design activities were furthered by the training given by Mechanic’s Institutes, Technical Schools and Schools of Art. Industrial production was accelerated by the threat of World War II when Australians made significant adaptations to imported American and British aeroplanes and military vehicles. The launch on the Holden in 1948 and other American-styled manufactured goods, stimulated by these wartime experiences and by American forms of ‘easy credit’, supplied an increasingly Americanised postwar consumer society. At this time design activity in Australia was transformed into a professional discipline with the development of the first professional designers’ associations and the first dedicated tertiary course in industrial design. The development of local design practice was also furthered by contributions made by immigrants, many of whom had technical skills lacking locally.

The promotion of Australian design began in the late nineteenth century with official and unofficial world exhibitions in nearly all Australian capital cities. Despite interruptions caused by the great depression and both world wars, local and imported design objects were displayed at home shows, boat shows, consumer goods exhibitions and trade fairs. The state art galleries provided venues for the promotion of local and imported design, including important exhibitions of Scandinavian design in the 1960s and 1970s, which had considerable influence on local designers. Although some retail outlets, interior designers and architects supported local design and manufacturing, in most cases the imported object had a glamour that the locally designed object could not match. Moreover, Australia’s small population and manufacturing base, and the practice of manufacturing local goods under license from overseas companies, meant that Australia’s individuality in industrial design was suppressed by the dominance of the design traditions of manufacturers from foreign countries, especially Britain, the USA, Scandinavia, Germany and Japan.

Kane, Barbara Brabazon

‘Rupert Bunny’s Symbolist Decade. A Study of the Religious and Occult Images 1887—1898'.

MA, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1998. (Roger Benjamin, Ann Galbally.)

The late nineteenth-century Australian-born artist Rupert Bunny has not been sufficiently acknowledged as a Symbolist figure. This study of his religious and occult works, the most explicit manifestation of his Symbolist preoccupations, shows how they engaged with the Symbolist discourse of the day, both in France and in Britain. In the 1880s and 1890s there was a resurgence in religious belief and an interest in religion, magic and the occult. Bunny began to paint images of the spiritual world, and occult themes, either from esoteric religions or classical myth, appears beside the legends of the saints and bible stories. His depictions of the occult world are little known, since only photographic and literary evidence remains of paintings like the La Tentation de St. Antoine, while a group of works on paper housed at The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne, remains unpublished. The iconography of these works dealing with Satanism, the Catholic occult, and ancient Greek and Nordic myths of death, is examined in their contemporary context. As with his contemporary Maurice Denis, Bunny’s flutter with the occult was confined to his youth. In the new century, after a brief engagement with more dramatic and naturalistic religious images based on Old Masters such as Rembrandt and Titian, he returned to images of beautiful women at leisure which drew critical acclaim.

Bunny’s British cultural heritage has largely been ignored, yet his paintings fit more easily into the broad Symbolist canon if read in such a context. Paintings such as Les Roses de Ste. Dorothée and the Burial of St Catherine of Alexandria are analysed in terms of their iconography, style and contemporary critical sources, allowing them to be reintegrated into the broader Symbolist dialectic. Although Bunny was a cosmopolitan by birth and education the question of nationalism arises as rival critics in France and Britain encouraged him to choose either Paris or London, and to paint accordingly.

Bunny sought recognition as an artist in the conservative venues of the Royal Academy and the Société des Artistes Français and his style reflects this. Clearly, he did not engage with the radical Symbolism seen in the private images of Odilon Redon, nor did he lose touch with the sculptured form of the human body. However, Bunny was genuinely a Symbolist in his subject matter and it is hoped that this study of his religious and occult work will initiate a reassessment of his work in the Symbolist decade.

Macneil, Roderick Peter

‘Blackedout: The Representation of Aboriginal People in Australian Painting 1850—1900’.

PhD, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1998. (Jeanette Hoorn.)

This thesis examines the representation of Aboriginal people in Australian painting between 1850 and 1900 and seeks to account for the decline in the frequency with which Aboriginal people were represented in mainstream academic art in the decades preceding Australia’s federation in 1901. It also investigates the ways in which a visual discourse of Aboriginality was realised in mid and late nineteenth-century Australian painting.

Figures of Aboriginal people formed a significant presence in Australian painting from the moment of first contact in the late eighteenth century until well into the nineteenth. It is argued that in paintings of the Australian landscape, as well as in portraiture and figure studies produced in the second half of the nineteenth century, images of Aboriginal people were used to signify the primordial ‘difference’ of the antipodean landscape. In these paintings, Aboriginality emerged as a motif of Australia’s precolonial past: a timeless, Arcadian realm that preceded European colonisation, and in which Aboriginal people enjoyed uncontested possession of the Australian landscape. This uncolonised landscape represented the antithesis of colonial civilisation, being both spatially and temporally distinct from the colonial nation.

It is argued that prior to Federation in 1901, Australian national identity was dependent upon the recognition and construction of a ‘difference’ that was seen to be implicit within the Australian landscape itself. This sense of ‘difference’ derived from settlers’ perception of the Australian environment, and became embodied in those objects which appeared most ‘different’ from settlers’ notion of the familiar. Colonial artists drew upon an iconography based upon this recognition of ‘difference’ to signify the geographical identity of the landscape which they painted. Aboriginal people were central to these icons of ‘Australian-ness’. Furthermore, the association of Aboriginal people with a precolonial Australia served to rationalise acts of colonial dispossession.

Representations of Aboriginal people dressed in a traditional manner, as well as those in which they are portrayed in European costume as ‘white but not quite’, underwrote colonial assertions of Aboriginal ‘primitiveness’ and precluded Aboriginal participation in the foundation of the Australian nation. The strengthening nationalist movement of the 1880s and 1890s meant that a new iconography was needed, one in which the triumph of the white settler culture over indigenous cultures could be celebrated. As a result, Aboriginal people began to disappear from the canvases of Australian artists, to be replaced by ‘white Aborigines’, who symbolised a new depth in the relationship between settler Australia and the landscape itself. As well, and more broadly, they were replaced by the image of the white frontiersman, the leitmotif of settler culture. This exclusion of Aboriginal people from the conceptualisation of the Australian nation reflects not only their ‘disenfranchisement’ within Australian society, but more significantly reveals the effectiveness with which a visual discourse of ‘Australia’ painted the Aboriginal out of existence.

Paffen, Paul

‘Art of Memory: The Portrait in Van Diemen’s Land’.

PhD, University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archaeology, 1999. (Ann Galbally.)

This thesis, which takes its title from the ancient mnemonic technique known as the art of memory (ars memoriae), argues that a symbiotic relationship exists between portraiture and memory. Portraits produced in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) from European settlement in 1803 until about 1860 are examined to test this thesis. The ideas and influences that sustained the European tradition of portraiture and the values ascribed to the portrait during the nascent years of the colony are also considered. The immanence of memory in interpretations of the colonial portrait recalls the perhaps forgotten power given to portraits to create and perpetuate values through their alliance with memory. This thesis assumes that the art of portraiture does not rest entirely within the realm of aesthetics, and so looks further afield in order to extend the boundaries of the interpretation of the colonial Tasmanian portrait by privileging the portrait as a site of memory. It is argued that the Tasmanian colonial portrait enjoyed its popularity largely because of its capacity to remind.

Chapter One briefly charts the course taken by the ‘art of memory’ through key periods in western history. It examines theories of memory in the writings of the ancients and of British empirical philosophers and establishes that, in their endeavour to understand the workings of human memory, these writers could not avoid engaging with the cornerstone of the art of memory, the mental image. They argued that the mental image stands at the intersection of the external object and its perception, and that memory is responsible for the transaction. The paradigm of associationism is explored to highlight the significance of memory to the processes of colonisation and immigration in Van Diemen’s Land. The relationship between the doctrine of the association of ideas and portraiture is developed.

Chapter Two employs documents to demonstrate that the portrait functioned for many colonists as a visual reminder that could overcome the ‘tyranny of distance’. The first part of this chapter considers what impelled individuals to transport portraits across physical space in order to convey to their recipients the idea of the subject portrayed. It also examines key moments in the production of portraiture in Van Diemen’s Land and identifies some of the professional portraitists working in the colony. The second part examines the early history of photography in the colony.

Chapter Three examines the visibility of the Tasmanian colonial portrait. Local studios of portraitists, and the exhibitions that were held in Van Diemen’s Land up to 1860, are examined in order to establish the significance attached to the public visibility of the portrait. Notices in newspapers are analysed to ascertain the value of memory ascribed to the portrait and the activity of memory that manifested the posting of such notices in the first instance.

Chapter Four explores the structure of society in Van Diemen’s Land in terms of social difference. Public and private portraits of individuals who were the representatives of civil government in its judicial or executive branches are examined in order to discern the difference between the public and private memories of these two types of authority. In Chapter Five forms of authority identified by the Scottish Enlightenment thinker Adam Smith are addressed in order to expose the ways in which the private portrait functioned as a pictorial record of the value placed upon private memory born from these different manifestations of authority.

Chapter Six explores the significance attributed to the face of the convict from the perspective of its participation in the systematisation of social memory. It asks how this system of memory steered both the remembering and the forgetting of the convicts who were sent as exiles from Britain to an island established as a penal colony. The focus of Chapter Seven is upon the relationship between genetic memory and the portrait. It examines the historical framing of the then current laws of generation governing the inherited resemblance of children to their parents and the capacity of the portrait to document this relationship. It is argued that a portrait is a record of two likenesses. One likeness is the connection between the actual subject and the portrayed subject and the other is the connection between the actual subject and his or her biological antecedents. This likeness is commonly called the family likeness. By drawing attention to the plurality of the likeness our understanding of the dimensions attached to the idea that the domestic portrait enjoyed its popularity because of its capacity to remind is augmented. A two-volume catalogue of all known Tasmanian colonial portraits is included as an appendix.

Bunbury, Alisa

‘The Graphic Journey: Murray Griffin Linocuts’.

MA, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1998. (Russell Staiff, Roger Butler.)

This thesis presents the first thorough examination and catalogue raisonné of all 144 prints of Vaughan Murray Griffin (1902—1992) produced in Melbourne between the 1920s and the 1980s. Its aim is to provide a body of empirical data for the examination of Griffin’s life and production and to analyse his prints in terms of wider social and artistic contexts. Although recognised as an important contributor to early twentieth-century Australian relief printing, Griffin’s work has received little attention in recent years. This analysis reveals that for a time he was at the forefront of Australian relief printmaking.

Griffin first experimented with printing techniques in the 1920s, before settling on linocuts as a enjoyable and profitable sideline to his landscape painting in oil. From 1932 until the 1970s, Griffin produced an opus of colourful linocuts created by a combination of multiple block and reduction processes. Production was interrupted by World War II, when Griffin served as an Official War Artist, spending three and a half years as a prisoner of war in Changi, Malaya. The majority of his prints are decorative images of Australian native birds which were popular items from the Depression years well into the post-war period. In addition to prints produced for the market, Murray produced a number of prints over the decades through which he developed and expressed personal ideas. These culminated in the 1960s group which Murray called his ‘Journey’ series, which dealt with his anthroposophical beliefs based on the teachings of Rudolf Steiner. Griffin’s involvement in anthroposophy and his concern to depict his beliefs in an intensely personal way has contributed to his neglect.

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Crombie, Isobel Leila

‘Body Culture: Max Dupain and the Social Recreation of the Body, c.1919—1939’.

PhD, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1998. (Jeanette Hoorn.)

Max Dupain is regarded as the most significant photographer working in Australia during the 1930s. This thesis examines his work in relation to the impact in Australia of what has been called the ‘body culture’ movement. After World War I many western countries enthusiastically subscribed to schemes designed to control, regulate and develop the body as a means of building individual health and fitness and assisting communal regeneration. Drawing on the pseudo-scientific theories of eugenics, ideas and methods concerning the revitalisation of the body became popular among a diverse range of groups. In a number of countries, including Australia, such discourses were linked to nationalism.

The primary focus of this thesis is on exploring how ‘body culture’ developed in Australia and how it was expressed in public culture, education and the visual arts. It investigates the relationship of Dupain’s work to the ‘body culture’ movement and the role that photography played in general in the imaginative rendering of utopian and dystopian ideas concerning the body in the interwar period.

Using a cultural studies methodology, the thesis investigates the dynamic interchange that evolved as photographs were used in a range of popular magazines, specialist publications and high art journals to record, authorise and perpetuate a range of ideological and social constructs regarding the body. As part of this examination, it is proposed that Australia’s most distinctive contribution to ‘body culture’ was through the development of two physical archetypes associated with the beach–the lifesaver and the surfer–and that the popularity of these icons was largely enabled through photography.

A biographical study of the artist investigates the impact of Dupain’s father, George Dupain, a pioneer physical educator and supporter of eugenics, and it is argued that his influence was significant in the formation of Dupain’s attitude to photographing the body. The influence of vitalism on Dupain’s creative development is examined and it is concluded that his reputation as an exemplar of modernist photography in Australia should more properly be seen as residing in his contributions in the 1930s to classical modernism rather than in the broader context in which he is customarily placed. It is argued that our understanding of commercial and art photographs of the body taken by Dupain and others is both broadened and enlivened when it is seen to be embedded in the discourses of ‘body culture’. It is proposed that the field of ‘body culture’ itself could not have captured the public’s imagination in the interwar period with as much force as it did without the aid of this most protean of media.

Haywood, Catherine

‘A Mutable Identity: A study of cultural duality in the Australian and Italian work of Domenico de Clario’.

MA, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (Christopher McAuliffe, Charles Green.)

De Clario’s dual cultural heritage has influenced the development of his diverse art from the mid-1960s until the late-1990s. His oeuvre describes a very personal response to migration at the age of nine from Italy to Australia in 1956. Through a chronological survey of his work, this thesis sets out to reveal how de Clario has manipulated a tension between formal aesthetic values and conceptual qualification in order to process and signify bi-cultural identity. It is argued that although de Clario’s shifts in methodology have echoed a larger art world debate between visual and experiential measures, his need to nominate a fluid identity between Australianness and Italianness has influenced his stylistic exploration.

De Clario’s mid 1960s memory-based paintings of the desolate urban Australian site and ephemeral installations of coastal debris in the natural environment are analysed in relation to debate over the relative authenticity of a central (European) and a peripheral (Australian) experience. De Clario’s early interest in the relationship between the appearance and function of architecture is compared with an avant-garde model.

Shifts in de Clario’s work made while holding a scholarship at the Brera and Urbino Academies in Italy in 1967 and 1968 are presented as a measured response to an international schism between visual and experiential forms. His gestural images of reconciliation with the Italian urban landscape are contrasted with a conditional involvement with the Italian avant-garde movement Arte Povera. De Clario’s increasingly mutable identification with Italian and Australian social models is discussed in relation to debate over the ability of Arte Povera to challenge the aesthetic and historical norms of Italian art.

De Clario’s engagement with an Australian avant-garde throughout the 1970s is analysed as a symptom of an ongoing crisis of national identity. His challenge to myths of colonialism through the politicisation of common experience and the use of ephemeral and conceptual method is discussed with regard to the general erosion or manipulation of an image-based aesthetic.

De Clario’s conditional embrace of painterly aestheticism throughout the 1980s is examined in relations to a fashionable resurgence of historical and cultural inflection. His idiosyncratic stylistic shifts between image-based Italianate expressionism, ascetic experimental music performance, and theory-laden collaged or panel paintings, are discussed as symptoms of identity hybridisation.

In conclusion, it is proposed that aspects of de Clario’s 1990s installations and blindfold painting can be linked to his earlier stylistic cycles and perceptions of cultural positioning. The term ‘cultural alchemy’ is introduced to describe the fluid relationship which de Clario’s work has maintained with cultural symbol and myth.

Whitehouse, Denise

‘The Contemporary Art Society of New South Wales and the Theory and Production of Contemporary Abstraction in Australia, 1947—1961.’

PhD, Monash University, Visual Culture Section, School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies, 1999. (Margaret Plant.)

This thesis investigates the construction of the cultural meaning and value of abstract art in Australia during the years 1947—1961. It challenges the conventional view that Australian postwar abstract painting was provincial and derivative of overseas ideas which arrived late and in the fragmented form of reproductions in magazines and postcards. It argues, first, that Australian postwar abstract painting emerged from a practice of abstraction originating in Sydney, and second, that it was the product of the particular combination of artistic, political and social circumstances that characterised Australian culture during the period.

The thesis explores the distinctive nature of Sydney’s artistic ideology and arts infrastructure and the way these provided the impetus and polemics for abstraction. The discussion centres on the New South Wales Contemporary Art Society, which, by establishing a promotional infrastructure and a theoretical discourse, educated the art world and the public to appreciate abstract art as the most advanced stream of modernism. The meaning and value of abstract art became a matter of intense debate during the 1950s, when the New South Wales Contemporary Art Society launched an aggressive campaign against the establishment’s assertion that art should serve society’s interests. By defining abstract painting as an autonomous discipline, dedicated to the disruption of social and cultural order, the New South Wales Contemporary Art Society and Sydney’s abstract painters helped to stimulate a national debate about the role of art and its relation to society which was instrumental in shaping the ideals and character of Australian postwar abstract painting.

Clarke, Julie

‘Transhuman Aesthetics: Performance Artists and Cyberculture’.

MA, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1997. (Christopher McAuliffe, Jeanette Hoorn.)

This thesis argues that through the practice of several performance artists–Stelarc, Orlan, Survival Research Laboratories and Dumb Type–medical technologies and computer imaging programs have contributed to the construction and perception of new body images. It demonstrates that these performance artists are not only engaging with advanced computer technologies in order to speak about its impact, but are also complicit with the technology to further advance their individual performance projects.

The focus is on the work of these artists in the period after1982 and the discovery of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), with the emphasis that this placed on the vulnerability of the human body. It is shown that the artists themselves contributed to the techno-theorising that surrounds the body in informatics and that they are heavily involved in the rhetoric which proposes that the body is obsolete in this new environment. Collectively, the artists are extreme examples of some of the theorising which surrounds the postbiological body, which includes endflesh notions, technological evolution, the body as site of invasion, the cybernetic body and the diseased body. Imaginary, phantom, hybrid and spectacular bodies are addressed in some or all of the cited artists’ work. By examining their work, this thesis addresses the perceived dissolution of boundaries between human and machine, interior and exterior, public and private space, surface and depth, and gender dislocation. It speaks also of fragmentation, resurrection, transformation and liminal states of being, theorised through transgender and cyborg, which are closely linked with Transhuman Aesthetics.

This thesis demonstrates how Orlan’s operation/performance critiques the mass media’s manipulation of body images, and how she resurrects aberrant forms as a strategy against sameness. It examines Stelarc’s rigorous investigation and surveillance of his own body and the symbiotic relationships between humans and machines. It looks briefly at Dumb Types performances, which reveal the dehumanisation of computer technology, particularly in relation to the way that HIV sufferers and other people are marginalised through medical diagnosis. It also examines the war on bodies brought about by various technologies of warfare addressed in the work of Survival Research Laboratories.

Chiba, Kathryn

‘Dr Joseph Brown: Dealing in Cultural Capital’.

Master of Art Curatorship (minor thesis), The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (Christopher Marshall.)

This thesis presents the first sustained examination of the art dealer Dr Joseph Brown, whose innovative dealership heralded a new style of commercial gallery in Melbourne. It also presents the first assessment of Brown’s achievements based on extensive interviews with him together with his dealer contemporaries and clients.

Established in 1967, the Joseph Brown Gallery has operated for over thirty years. Rather than chronologically documenting Brown’s dealership, this thesis explores the significance of his innovations with respect to Melbourne’s art market. The essence of his dealership style is captured in the concept ‘dealing in cultural capital’, a term chosen to signify Brown’s conservative approach which favoured the promotion of artists with established reputations. This thesis also considers Brown’s activities as consultant, benefactor, agent at auction and collector, and their influence on his developing dealership profile.

Many of Brown’s most important relationships were with public and corporate collectors. His approach proved attractive to those who shared his preference for established artists. For this thesis, certain key institutional collectors made available unpublished records which revealed the patterns of the acquisitions resulting from their association with Brown. Analysing the kinds of works acquired enhances our understanding of Brown’s client relationships and reinforces the essence of his dealership style. Thus, there is a balance between the examination of Brown’s dealership and of his clients’ collections as a manifestation of that style.

Underpinning this thesis is an examination of the circumstances surrounding Brown’s dealership. The emergence of the modern art market in Melbourne, the development of some of Australia’s most prestigious public collections, and the advent of the corporate collector, all inextricably linked to the emergence of an Australian art investment market, are the themes which anchor this thesis historically. What distinguishes this thesis from previous research on these themes is that it draws them together through the perspective of a single dealer whose career spans over three decades and who may therefore be regarded as a reflection of the development of the Melbourne art market.

In considering Brown foremost as a dealer, this thesis goes beyond the popular focus on him as a collector. Since Brown ceased exhibiting in 1982, most of what has been written about him concerns the future of his collection. It is, therefore, timely that his dealership be recognised for its place in the development of the Melbourne art market.

Hildebrandt, Karen

‘Art, Cyberspace and Hypertextual Accessibility’.

Master of Art Curatorship (minor thesis), The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (Alison Inglis, Angela Ndalianis.)

This thesis deals with the relationship between art, cyberspace and hypertextual accessibility. The hypertext form indicative of cyberspace is examined in order to explore the position of the spectator in relation to the work of art on the Internet. The experience of this new, hypertextual exhibition venue is situated in the shift from the traditional linear exhibition format to the multilinear structure of the Internet. The analysis of the hypertext form leads to the question of the ‘artist’ in cyberspace, where notions of artist and spectator are able to merge and change. Similarly, particular art and museum sites are considered through the framework of the hypertext structure in order to ascertain the implications of the new visual and textual spaces that cyberspace incorporates.

James, Kirsty

‘Hogarth in the Baillieu: Precedents and Projections. A Study of the Hogarth Print Collection of The Baillieu Library, The University of Melbourne’.

MA, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1998. (Vivien Gaston, Alison Inglis.)

This thesis explores the nature, history and significance of the Hogarth print collection in The Baillieu Library, The University of Melbourne. After tracing the collection’s history from the original gift of Dr Orde Poynton in 1959, followed by brief explorations of two other major collections of Hogarth prints in Victoria at the National Gallery of Victoria and the City of Hamilton Art Gallery, the collection is considered in relation to the history of the collecting of Hogarth prints in order to better understand the collection today and to provide for a consideration of its future.

Hogarth prints had meaning for a wide eighteenth-century audience because of their direct engagement with contemporary issues and debates and because of their role in constituting the visual expression of Enlightenment thought. The collection of Hogarth’s prints in Sir John Soane’s Museum, founded in the early nineteenth century, is associated with a shift from public to private constructions of meaning. It is argued that, alongside the personal interpretations made possible by their being situated in a private museum, the prints maintained a vital relationship with their audiences through the dialogue that Soane set up between the prints and the issues of his time. An aspect of this dialogue is Soane’s criticism of the universality of the project embodied in the development of the British Museum. It is argued that the encyclopedic project of the British Museum, dedicated to knowledge and classification, and reflected in the development of its Print Room, resulted in the ossification of Hogarth’s work within an academic structure, a narrowed perspective, and a distancing from wider audiences.

It is argued that these historical elements are an essential part of any consideration of the present and the future of the Baillieu Library Hogarth print collection. How can this collection, embedded in Enlightenment structures of knowledge, continue to engage with the audiences and the wealth of possible perspectives of the twenty-first century? Conservation, access and continued interpretation are identified as key issues to ensure the continued life of the collection, and the concept of consilience is explored as one interpretive direction.

Burns, Karen Lisa

‘Urban Tourism, 1851—53: Sightseeing, Representation and The Stones of Venice’.

PhD, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (Roger Benjamin, Jeanette Hoorn.)

When John Ruskin journeyed to Venice in November 1849 to begin work on the project culminating in The Stones of Venice (1851—1853), tourism was already a recognisable discourse: a network of terms, objects and practices. In the 1840s the figure of the tourist had been publicly satirised by the English writer Charles Dickens and by the periodical press. The tourist/traveller binary had been formed which continued to dominate discussions of travel well into the 1980s.

Ruskin’s text was addressed to the traveller, but its use by tourists and its role in consolidating Venice as a sign and set of practices in English tourist discourse was denigrated by Ruskin in later life, and the text’s place in tourist practice was subsequently disavowed by some Ruskin scholars. Tourist studies have identified the mid and late nineteenth century as the birth moment of modern tourism. Ruskin’s text, published in the early 1850s, offers an occasion to reassess the relationship between the book and tourist practice, and to investigate existing theories of tourism’s origin, timing, and conceptual and empirical effect.

This thesis investigates the continuities and discontinuities between Ruskin’s text and earlier and emergent tourist genres and media. It focuses on spatial and visual practices, areas somewhat under-represented in the existing field of research which is overwhelmingly literary and textual, attendant to the what of meaning rather that the how of signification. Some of these visual and spatial genres were well established at the time of Ruskin’s research–such as the guidebook and lighting practices at tourist sites–but were undergoing transformation. Images of travel circulated widely in the nineteenth century through existing forms–notably books, prints, the diorama and panorama–and emergent forms such as photography.

This thesis analyses Ruskin’s relation to these media and to the larger historical narratives claiming that visual and transport technologies transformed conditions and practices of tourist spectatorship. Investigating the tourist event, it seeks to draw more careful distinctions between representations of travel sights, the practices enacted by the tourist on site, and in the stabilisation of tourist memory after the event. The sightseeing event as a moment of subject formation is also analysed.

Framing Ruskin’s text within tourist discourse alters his established place in the terrain of cultural modernity, and indeed may change that term’s pantheon of spokespeople, meanings, reach and location. This thesis argues that the tourist practices associated with Ruskin’s text–the viewing and inhabiting of history through textual, spatial and visual representation–engaged issues of technology, signification, history and modernity. Although cultural modernity has generally been discovered in the metropolis, Ruskin’s work used tourism, and a regional, non-metropolitan place, as a space for sorting out arguments about modernity: its effects and subject formations. The thesis suggests that studies of tourist practice and non-metropolitan locations may reframe understandings of nineteenth-century modernity.

Lewis, Julianne Elizabeth

‘Shadows on the Landscape: Memorial Aspects of the Great Ocean Road’.

Master of Tourism and the Visual Arts (minor thesis), The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (John Pigot.)

Victoria’s commemorative landscape is made up of a series of natural and constructed features comprising roads, bridges, memorial sculptures, avenues of honour, coastal fortifications and military memorabilia, yet their memorialising function goes largely unrecognised by the general population. Some of these memorials have been linked with the scenic landscape and have become privileged as tourist sites, but their original meanings have become blurred.

This thesis examines one component of Australia’s memorial landscape, the Great Ocean Road in South West Victoria, and questions whether there is a parallel between the Western concept of a memorial landscape and the notion of spirituality in the land which is the primary component of the belief structure of indigenous peoples. This leads to an examination of the local geographical landscape in relation to the sites of Aboriginal massacres, and a questioning of the congruence between such sites and the now memorialised battlefields of World War I.

Chapter One deals with the history of the Great Ocean Road and traces its development and construction from 1916 to 1932. Chapter Two examines the place of the Great Ocean Road in the overall scheme of post-World War I memorialisation, and questions why its original function has been so little recognised by the community. Chapter Three looks at the complex relationships between the physical and spiritual elements of the land as perceived by Aboriginal culture, investigates Aboriginal massacre sites in proximity to the Great Ocean Road, and questions why no memorials have been raised to Aborigines who died defending their land. Finally, on the basis that landscape is socially and culturally determined and that place can be invested with spiritual potency, it is argued that for a place to retain its spiritual strength, regardless of the culture, the spiritual content must be recognised, ritualised and constantly refreshed within that culture.

Martin, Gregory

‘Monuments of a Fading Landscape: Art in Public Seattle’.

MA, The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (Russell Staiff.)

This thesis draws upon art history, critical theory, and urban studies to give a critical account of Seattle’s public art programs. Given the site-specific nature of many of the works, the research undertaken for the project is predominantly fieldwork. It is the contention of this thesis that while Seattle Arts Commission designs have manifested a proclivity towards fostering and empowering the community, in practice public participation remains largely circumvented. Public intervention is crucial, given what is at stake: the concept of the public is being narrowed, appropriated by the corporate sector, and recoded in terms of the economic, attendant on the deregulation and privatisation of actual public space, services and amenities in urban America. Freedom and democracy are conventions predicated on the existence of public space. Thus civitas and democracy are threatened.

Public art in the United States has historically been implicated in the construction of civic landscapes. In the 1970s, prompted by the evacuation of the city centre, recession, and anxiety over the lack of an authentic regional identity, Seattle’s public art programs endeavoured to position ‘community’–the microcosm of the public–in the visual city. Tension between desire for economic and semantic security remains predominant in the city and is mirrored and enacted at the level of Seattle’s public art.

As the omnipresence of nature occludes the lack of open public space in Seattle, so the prevalence of art in this municipality tends towards signifying ‘public’ presence and benefit while occluding, by standing in for, the development of an organic sense of identity and public place. Programs such as the Department of Neighbourhoods Matching Fund, which emphasise public participation rather than the art-object, reduce the likelihood that Seattle’s public art will soon be memorials to the disappearance of ‘the public’.

Ross, Jane Elizabeth

‘Regional Victorian Arts Festivals: From Community Arts to an Industry-Based Model’.

Master of Tourism and the Visual Arts (minor thesis), The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (Alison Inglis.)

This thesis investigates the way in which the growth and direction of festivals have been influenced by the State and Commonwealth festival policies from their introduction in 1973 until the present. Although a large number of policy documents examined in this thesis are relevant to the arts festival sector as a whole, it is primarily be concerned with the development of regional festivals in Victoria which have a specific arts focus or a strong arts component.

State and Commonwealth government festival policies have undergone considerable change since 1973 which has resulted in significant developments in the evolution of festivals. From 1973 to 1983 festival policy was concerned with fostering community participation in, and access to, the arts, spawning a marked increase in arts festivals statewide. During the 1980s policies continued to encourage festival growth but with the additional interest in promoting the tourism potential of these events. The new commercial dimension acknowledged that arts festivals had significant economic potential and paved the way for the introduction of the industry-based model in the 1990s. This model reflected the growing concern with efficiency, sustainability and viability across all State and Commonwealth government sectors. The resulting emphasis on good business practice and accountability came at a time when other significant influences, such as local government reform and increased audience expectations, were also affecting the development of festivals.

The thesis argues that although the adoption of an industry-based model for festival policy has assisted festival organisers to accommodate current changes within the sector, it does not address all the challenges. Issues such as the level of community support for the event, the relationship between the arts and tourism industries, the balance between imported and local talent, and the availability of resources to enable festivals to meet the demands of the industry-based model must also be addressed when seeking to establish and maintain an arts festival.

Wilson, Bronwyn Anne

‘The Township of Lancefield from a Cultural Tourism Perspective’.

Master of Tourism and the Visual Arts (minor thesis), The University of Melbourne, School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archeology, 1999. (Alison Inglis, Kate Darian-Smith.)

This thesis examines the visual history of the Victorian township of Lancefield in order to determine whether the contemporary streetscape provides sufficient resources to reconstruct the historical landscape. The role of tourism within the town is examined and the past and potential use of visual imagery–particularly the historical streetscape–is explored. The indigenous landscape is discussed together with the history of the town from early European settlement. Federal and State heritage registers, as well as the Macedon Ranges Shire Planning Scheme and heritage studies, are examined to determine the extent of protection afforded to historical sites within the town and surrounding region. Lancefield sites classified and listed on Federal, State and local government registers are reviewed. The emerging interest in heritage preservation and the formation of bodies to protect historical sites are investigated by using Lancefield as a case study. The thesis presents a ‘Lancefield Heritage Walk’ for local residents and tourists to the town which is intended to create an awareness of the township’s history through its visual culture.