Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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‘Ashantee Loot is Unique’: British Military Culture and the Taking of Objects in the Third Anglo-Asante War, 1873-1874
Get PDFThere exists a popular perception that all objects collected as a result of British military action in imperial settings can be termed ‘loot’ or ‘plunder’. This article argues otherwise and demonstrates that for British officers serving in the Third Anglo-Asante War (1873-1874) there existed a shared understanding of the legitimate and illegitimate ways objects could be acquired, with specific terms used to describe both practices. Furthermore, it highlights how objects acquired during the war were considered, displayed and interpreted in British institutions, centring the importance of setting in determining the object’s significance and meaning to different groups of people
‘Musical under the touch of the Universe’: Aesthetic Liberalism, Music, and Vernon Lee’s Essayistic Art of Resonance
Get PDFVernon Lee’s essayistic writings on music are underpinned by an ethical commitment to modes of relationality that sustain a vibrant connection between self and world. For Lee, certain styles of Western art music – most notably eighteenth-century Italian opera – facilitate through their formal and affective affordances experiences of spiritual and moral healthiness: a heightened awareness of one’s personal agency and autonomy; an affirmed sense of stable, integrated selfhood; and a sympathetic openness to the claims of the other. Attending to the relational dynamics of Lee’s essays allows us to register more fully the range of affective modes her works inhabit, and to think more carefully about the relationship between her ethical commitments and her distinctive treatment of the essay form. It also enables a more careful consideration of the place of Lee’s writings on music within broader cultures of liberalism in the late-nineteenth century, one that manifests itself not only in the social and political claims made for music in her writing but also within the stylistic affordances of her experiments with essayistic writing
Orientalist Aestheticism: Vernon Lee, Carlo Gozzi, and the Venetian Fairy Comedy
Get PDFVernon Lee’s relationship with Venice might be described as troublesome yet productive. It informed a variety of her works including Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), her erudite history of Italian culture which includes chapters on Venetian theatre that focus on Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi; A Wicked Voice’, a disturbing story of musical possession that appears in her 1890 collection, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories, in which a nineteenth-century composer becomes obsessed with the voice of an eighteenth-century singer; her novella Lady Tal (1892), a light-hearted satire in the realist mode; and The Prince of the Hundred Soups (1883), a children’s story that uses stock characters from the commedia dell’arte to tell the tale of an opera singer, Signora Olimpia Fantastici, and her adventures in ‘Bobbio’, a watery city that can only be Venice
Review: Guilherme Carréra, Brazilian Cinema and the Aesthetics of Ruins (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021)
Get PDFAt a time of crisis of the liberal democratic project throughout much of the Western world, the examination of ‘ruins’ in relation to the development/underdevelopment of nation-states emerges as a timely topic worthy of investigation through the cinematic lens of documentarists and filmmakers of both developed and developing countries alike. Notably, the examination of what constitutes a ruin – with its aesthetic of decay and marginalization – has been explored by various traditions of realism in different national cinemas, from Italian neo-realism to Iranian film, within a context where the filmmaker’s camera focuses on the destruction of cities and sites in contrast to the nation’s political and economic problems as well as its social inequalities
Screwball
Get PDFAs an artist and curator whose practice mines film culture and genre – Hollywood, pornography, amateur videos – I promote screwball logics but also draw a line back to the work of Charles Baudelaire, that connoisseur, to which Aaron Poochigan refers as the ‘tender freak of freaks’, whose unabashed intimate style always generates a strange ambiguity, not least because of the way Romanticism and realism cross paths in his work. It is in the decadent tradition of Baudelaire that I re-enact scenes, appropriate scripts and mess with genres in my own creative practice. This essay articulates the decadent methodology of the screwball via reference to the video and installation works I curated in the show of the same name at Verge Gallery in Sydney, Australia, June-July 2022. A mix of commissioned and existing pieces, Screwball featured work by California-based artists Harry Dodge, Stanya Kahn, P. Staff, and Aimee Goguen, alongside work by Australia-based artists Sione Monū, Nat Randall and Anna Breckon, Jimmy Nuttall, Brian Fuata, Frances Barrett, Archie Barry, Athena Thebus and Chloe Corkran, and Garden Reflexxx
Exhibition Review: A Century of the Artist’s Studio: 1920 – 2020
Get PDFWe were drawn to this exhibition having just published our co-edited book ‘Contemporary Practice in Studio Art Therapy’. We were curious to see what links we might find between therapeutic art studios and studios in the world of fine art, as represented through one hundred years of art history
Development and Decadent Time in Nineteenth-Century Hawaiʻi
Get PDFThe Hawaiʻi of literary renown seems to exist outside the normal flow of time. Charles Warren Stoddard, in his memoir Hawaiian Life: Lazy Letters from Low Latitudes (1894), recalls the beautiful ‘boat-boy of Lahaina’ in just such temporally ambiguous terms: although the travel writer had not seen the native youth in years, Stoddard muses that ‘the finger of Time doubles up the moment it points toward him’, so that ‘he must be still lying in wait for me, […] not a day older, not a particle changed’. In the case of Hawaiʻi, this pervasive trope of stasis exists in tension with alternative and often contradictory models of time as cyclical, regressive, and even hyper-accelerated, such that Hawaiian history appears to unfold in fits and starts, jumping forward and looping backward in ways that resist linear understandings of progress. Later in Hawaiian Life, for instance, Stoddard reflects on the fate of Kane-Pihi, a local fisherman who in the span of a few months transforms from a ‘gentle savage’ into a streetwise petty thief and eventual convict. For Stoddard, Kane-Pihi’s rapid evolution – which ends with his ignominious death in prison – recreates in miniature the story of a race doomed to collapse under the weight of modernity and its steady drumbeat of ‘development’
Review: Gustave Kahn, The Solar Circus, trans. by Sam Kunkel (Michigan City, IN: First to Knock, 2023)
Get PDFGiven the vast number and variety of contributions Gustave Kahn made to the French literary and artistic fields in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is surprising he is not better known in France or elsewhere. Kahn was an exceptionally multi-faceted author and critic who, among other achievements, had a major impact on free verse in France and the development of the French Symbolist movement in the 1880s and 90s. In the early twentieth century, Kahn was a significant influence on F. T. Marinetti, the Italian founder of Futurism. During the 1920s and 30s, Khan played a major role in the French Jewish cultural renaissance. This prolific writer published more than 1600 articles, books, and poems during a fifty-year period from 1886 to his death in 1936, and his art criticism is still read to this day
