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- Volume 3, Issue 1, 2017
JAWS: Journal of Arts Writing by Students - Volume 3, Issue 1-2, 2017
Volume 3, Issue 1-2, 2017
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Interview with Arnold Aronson
More LessAbstractOur guest editorial takes the form of an interview between the JAWS editorial team and the Professor of Theatre at Columbia University, Arnold Aronson. Given how JAWS is collaborating with the Theatre and Performance Research Association (TaPRA) in this issue, it seemed only fitting that we interview an academic whose work in theatre has contributed so much to how we understand our wider visual culture.
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Space and value in the contemporary art museum: The journey of a performance document at Tate
More LessAbstractThe space of the museum, rather than being monolithic and heterogeneous, is complex, fluid and fractured. As an institution, its multiple spaces relate to a variety of activities, motivations and attitudes towards the objects it collects, conserves and displays. By using Michel Foucault’s 1967 notion of the ‘heterotopia’ to read the museum as a space of spaces, and focusing on the complex object of the performance document, this article traces the link between the placement of objects in a specific space, and how this can be read as a perspective on their value. In tracing the journey of the Joseph Beuys performance document Four Blackboards (1972) through various spaces at Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) and Tate Modern, this article will demonstrate those acts of valuation being undertaken over a 50-year period in the institution, and explore how changing value perspectives result in a changing space, both physically and conceptually, for the performance document.
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Re-ghosting the ‘haunted stage’: The Epidaurus Festival and the resignification of (theatre) space
More LessAbstractSince the official opening of the annual Epidaurus Festival in 1955, the ancient theatre of Epidaurus had been hosting (with very few exceptions) only performances of ancient Greek drama. This exclusive use of Epidaurus for productions of ancient drama had defined not only the Festival’s orientation but also the perception of the theatre space itself. Given the importance of antiquity for the construction of modern Greek identity, Epidaurus often became a site where different convictions of heritage and ‘linear’ historical continuity have been expressed and challenged both onstage and by the spectators/critics. Yet, in 2007, the Epidaurus Festival started hosting, for the first time in its history, productions of non-ancient drama. Based on Carlson’s analysis of ‘ghosting’, the aim of this article is to explore how the Festival, through these productions, attempted not only to reflect on its own tradition but to resignify this (ideologically) charged theatre space. My notion of ‘re-ghosting’ aspires to describe the possible effect that this short-lived attempt to ‘open’ Epidaurus may still have upon the perception of the ‘haunted’ ancient theatre.
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A typology of silence
More LessAbstractDoes silence exist and if so where and how? Is it an aural concern alone, or is it perceived and experienced? Can we recognize it and what is its function in plays? This developing typology of silence examines the materiality of silence, how playwrights frame it and what it communicates. Silences that unword language and create an underworld of space that lingers between noise and silence, words and silence. The continually renegotiated space of silence and words, silence and sound that challenge and dismantle meaning, whilst acknowledging the power and danger of a silence imposed. Do words break silence, or does silence devour words?
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Evading narcissism: Methexis and ecology in immersive performance
By Will OsmondAbstractThis article identifies a trend in scholarship on immersive theatre practice towards a prioritization of the internal and private. It proposes that for some performances that have been characterized as ‘immersive’, these analytic strategies prove ineffective. It proposes the concept of methexis as an alternative conceptualization and strategy for analysing interactive performance events. The argument draws on the ontologies of Plato and the aesthetics of Paul Carter and Barbara Bolt to construct a case for using methexis as a tool for analysing Coney’s Early Days (of a better nation).
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Gaps, lapses and (hyper)links: On queerness and virtuality
More LessAbstractThis article works in response to a series of my own performances that explore the valences of what I will call ‘queer virtuality’. The work aims to textually and performatively understand the ways in which virtuality has allowed for the embodiment of a queer identity and how the virtual can be conceptualized as queer. It does so through a mode of argumentation that is faithful to the projects of scrolling, Google searches and cruising. While arguing for the links between queerness and virtuality, it discusses and engages with diverse references in passing as hyperlinks dictating a not-so-linear path of argument.
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Glamour’s gaze and two modes of glamour
More LessAbstractGlamour is seldom defined as an inward disposition. However, the inward constituents of glamour contain the key to its lasting allure. Audrey Hepburn is held to be a paragon of glamour yet she continually disrupts glamour’s tendency towards static, idealized forms. In Funny Face (Donen, 1957) she plays an inquisitive woman unfazed by ‘fashion magazines’, endorsing ‘self-impressions’ and hence an introspective mode of evaluation. Repeatedly, Hepburn’s characters give glamour a parodic edge. We are led towards a mode of glamour defined by how it is lived and how it regards itself. The significance of this is brought into sharp contrast by comparison with the glamour exhibited by Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka. In 1966 Audrey Hepburn and Tamara de Lempicka graced the museums of Paris – Hepburn in William Wyler’s film, How to Steal a Million (1966), and de Lempicka in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs’s exhibition, which consecrated Art Deco style. The apparently antagonistic modes of glamour presented by Hepburn and de Lempicka, who was herself infatuated with Hollywood, highlight how glamour’s defining feature lies in how it is lived. The most significant gaze ultimately belongs to the subject itself rather than to the viewer.
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Towards a post-materialist practice in expanded cinema
By Karel DoingAbstractStructural/materialist film and expanded cinema, as practised within the United Kingdom, found their origins within the ‘London Filmmakers’ Co-op’. This article argues that structural/materialist practice has evolved and while some of the original pre-occupations leading towards this type of work remain, others have changed significantly. The focus of this article is on expanded cinema work, as within this domain, this shift can be seen most clearly. Four contemporary expanded cinema works are described and discussed, demonstrating and revealing the underlying ideological concerns.
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The repeating self: Sarah Lucas’ Self-Portraits (an experiment in art writing)
More LessAbstractIn Self-Portraits, Sarah Lucas employs Barthes’ notion of the punctum like an overused punch line: forcing an intentional moment when the puzzle pieces come together and trigger a ‘prick’. To bring together the object of analysis – Lucas’ self-portraits – and the text of analysis, I employ in writing the same intentional punctum (a rupturing of the prose through the written repetition of themes, arguments and questions) that Lucas employs through photography. This adaption in writing of Lucas’ strategy of representation reveals further, and different knowledge, than other forms of art writing might in unpacking the central question, what does repetition in Lucas’ selfportraits reveal about identity and gender? Repetition is fundamental to the ways in which Lucas both displays and disarms her ‘self’ through the photographic portraits. Lucas’ repetitive visual vernacular leaves her identity paradoxically unstable – simultaneously constituted but punctured by that which it seeks to tear down – while the deliberate and repeated use of psychoanalytic citations and gender performance leaves Lucas inhabiting a state of inbetweeness.
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Keeping the rock rolling: Art activism and the avant-garde
More LessAbstractMuch recent critical and philosophical thinking on the relationship between art, politics and society chronologically grounds itself on linear understandings of the transformations of art and history. The first two decades of this century witnessed a wave of socially engaged artistic practices confused with activist strategies of political revolt. This article is an examination of the relationship between recent forms of art activism and the discontiguities of the different revolutionary claims of the history of the avant-garde. Counterposing the ideas of ‘a pure world of art’ – of art conceived as an autonomous domain from society – and of the ‘self-suppression of art in life’, or art’s identification with society, the article distinguishes recent forms of art activism from both political uses of artistic devices and artists’ individual commitment to politics in order to question what kind of art and what kind of politics art activism actually is.
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Necessitating my alliance: A meditation on the Plaszow concentration camp
By Gary SpicerAbstractThe writing that follows is a part theoretical, part-discursive response to a site of Holocaust memory and is an interaction with extracts from my ongoing journals. It is an examination of how established positions of objectivity and subjectivity as defined by the traditional academic thesis can be challenged when fused with practice and explores whether there are ways of bridging the gap between different writing genres in order for new forms to emerge. The article discusses writing as a further agency of my creative practice, its potential as an artistic form and as an additional method of critical enquiry. The article then investigates how the gesture of drawing as a projection of the body and the mediator between mind and world is an alternative vehicle to be ‘with’ and encounter the topography of the Holocaust. In relation to events as ineffable as the Holocaust, the article concludes by looking at how, by reaching for meaning through written or arts practice, we can perhaps begin to determine a contribution to what is, as Ava Hoffman describes in her book After Such Knowledge, an appropriate and measured response before, as we approach a time without living survivors, the Holocaust passes fully into history and myth.
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A reflection on practice-related research – the case of radio journalism
More LessAbstractA reflection on conducting and articulating practice-related research, based on a reading of the article entitled ‘Radio journalism as research – a Ph.D. model’, by Mia Lindgren (2014) in The Radio Journal – International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media, 12:1&2, pp. 169–182. Lindgren’s case study was her Ph.D. thesis, ‘Journalism as research: Developing radio documentary theory from practice’ (2011), Murdoch University, Perth.
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Exhibition Review
More LessAbstractIncoming, Richard Mosse, Barbican’s Curve Gallery, London, 15 February–23 April 2017
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YOLOCAUST Project, Shahak Shapira, Berlin, 2017
More LessAbstractDebate on (in/) appropriate behaviours at Holocaust sites has been raging ever since the field of ‘dark tourism’ (tours of sites of atrocities) rose to prominence in the 1990s. It has peaked in recent years with the appearance of the ‘Holocaust selfie’ (selfies taken at various Holocaust sites, generally designated for online publication). In 2017, Shahak Shapira launched his online project YOLOCAUST: a compendium of such selfies drawn from social media superimposed onto graphic Holocaust imagery. The project intended to shine light on the phenomenon and possibly shame its participants. This article critiques YOLOCAUST and its intentions, probing its cohesion and questioning Shapira’s success in offering a social comment on this new mode of online behaviour.
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