Troubling Views
Jagiellonian University
Experiences of Remoteness: How to [Re]experience Intimacy View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Richard Allaway
In a world predominately entangled in economic, political, and social chaos, it can be difficult to find an environment that is free from the clutter of human chaos. I consider, what formations of the natural environment can be found and experienced? Why should the human re-encounter the natural environment? How does one acknowledge a remotely intimate experience, and can this be shared? As an artist I am searching for escape. Driven by notions of romance I explore natural landscapes that heighten the senses and enable intimate encounters with natural phenomenon. Taking myself to remote locations within the UK (North Yorkshire Moors, Galloway Forest, et al), I walk within the landscapes encountering wilderness within its most natural state. Through walking and wild camping, I provide myself a space and platform to approach methods of documentation. Journal writing, image capture and sound recording allow me to record my place within these remote natural environments. These methods provide a direct and immediate form of autoethnographic reflection. In walking, I find a rhythm that allows me to think-through the relationship between the human and the environment and reconnect multiple times often via the artistic approaches captured. My research considers how I might disseminate practical approaches and outcomes to a wider audience to promote other ways of being and to establish or acknowledge that there is a need for the individual to step out of the global entanglement and experience natural phenomena or environmental aesthetics as a positive and intimate re-encounter.
Universal Resistance to Depicting Consumption in Visual Arts: Eating is Ugly
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Constance Kirker
While there is general agreement that food itself can be beautiful, countless still-life painters would agree, depicting the act of eating, actually placing food in one’s mouth, is seemingly taboo. The environment created around consumption – dining rooms, lines, china, flowers- is often consciously intended to provide a pleasing aesthetic experience. Artists, from Roman frescoes painters to contemporary photographers, create images of feasts with hundreds of diners to solitary subjects enjoying a cup of tea and a biscuit, but rarely do they show food or drink touching lips. Of the countless paintings of the Last Supper, the food remains on the table. Of the few examples that do depict food-in-mouth, Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, for example, or the ubiquitous photos in wedding albums of brides and grooms smashing wedding cake into each other’s mouths, the images are seemingly intended to be particularly ugly or humorous in a distasteful way. This paper explores theories that include the implicit sexuality of eating, the distortion of the face while eating, eating as a metaphor for gluttony, and the simple practicality of the difficulty of an artist’s model maintaining a chewing position. If art is a reflection of society, what drives the universal impulse to hide this very human function?
The Soundtrack in Nikolai Gubenko’s Film The Orphans (1977) and Soviet Cinema of Trauma View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elena Baraban
Despite the Soviet Union’s colossal casualties in WWII, Soviet post-war society and culture avoided discussion of psychic traumas that the war had caused. Of more than 500 Soviet films about this war, only a few depict it as traumatizing human psyche and focus on protagonists whose emotional state may be described as posttraumatic stress disorder. In this paper, I discuss Nikolai Gubenko’s feature film "Podranki" (Wounded Game or The Orphans, 1977) that depicts teenaged children who were raised in an orphanage near Odessa following the war against Nazi Germany. While the film credits do not specify which pieces of music one hears in the film's soundtrack, music forms an essential means in depicting the protagonist’s attempts to cope with his pain. The works by Alessandro Marcello, Antonio Vivaldi, Arcangelo Corelli, and George Frideric Handel are paired with popular songs (foxtrots and tangos) from the 1940s. The theoretical framework for this study are the works by Daniel Golmark, Lawrence Kramer, Richard Leppert, and Cathy Caruth. For Gubenko, who wrote the script of this film, played the role of an antagonist in it, and selected all music for this feature himself, "The Orphans" were a way of coping with his own war traumas and his own orphaned childhood. Since one of the signs of trauma is impossibility of articulation (Cathy Caruth), soundtrack components such as music become especially important in capturing the psychological state of the inarticulate children.
After Neutrality: A Case Study of a Museum Exhibition in a Western Australian Coal Mining Town View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Melanie McKee, Janice Baker
Museum scholars observe, and many champion, the move toward museum activism. Institutions that do not take an active stance on issues, notably climate change and energy transition, risk being irrelevant or engaged in misinformation. This dilemma is examined by assessing the impact of a 2022 group exhibition and public program, curated for Collie Art Gallery, a premier venue located in the south-west of Western Australia. Since the discovery of coal in 1893, Collie has been vital to Western Australia’s economy and energy sector. However, as Australia joins the inevitable shift away from fossil fuels there are implications for resource towns like Collie, which are required to transition to diversified economies that are not yet clearly defined. The artists reflected on landscapes around Collie as sites of flux rather than static places. Respectful of the interests of the community their research culminated in an exhibition in the Gallery, whose presence in a small, conservative town reflects its community’s support for diversification. The Gallery is amidst the living tensions of significant geopolitical change, but is this tension adequately addressed in the gallery program? This case study examines the effectiveness of the exhibition and its attendant workshops and talks in activating the gallery. We consider how individuals were moved to think differently about Collie and to reflect this thinking in conversations and creative outcomes; and weigh the challenges and implications of art museums supporting the call to ‘stay with the trouble’ by positioning themselves as sites for meaningful and radical intervention and change.
