No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This research project physically and theoretically investigates a relationship between body and place, via site-specific performance-making processes in diverse Australian sites. It encompasses the creation of two live performances and a video installation, the development of which are documented and elucidated in a written exegesis. The exegesis and associated performance processes explore the proposition that movement/ dance—as a spatial practice—can be a mode of locating, or an attempt to locate. ‘Locating’ implies an endless process that is always heading towards location, place, total presence—but may never arrive. Using practice-based, embodied research as its methodology, environmental information from the specific site is gathered via sensory perception tasks, some derived from Body Weather (a movement philosophy developed by Japanese dancer Min Tanaka), generating an improvisational exchange of perception and response. This ‘locating dance’ is the relationship between body and the place: it is simultaneously the seeking of relationship and the expression, enactment or illustration of it. In seeking location in relation to Australian sites from the perspective of a body that is white, the research also interrogates white Australian identity in relationship to this country, with the knowledge of the genocide and dispossession that its history entails. The work of theorists of place and space, as well as local historical and ecological sources, provide the framework for this series of excavations. Via traveling in Europe and to Aboriginal Land in the Northern Territory, insights develop into the cultural and corporeal residue of colonisation. Thus, the specific geographical site of each of the performance works acts also as a microcosm for, or reference point to, the broader site of contemporary Australia and the non-Aboriginal postcolonial experience of place. Representation of the body in performance is constructed in various ways to acknowledge the implications of its whiteness. The locating dances and performance works that comprise Locating: Place and the Moving Body engage in a multi-sensory listening to the country that aspires towards (white Australian) location—that elusive and longed-for ‘belonging’ or true ‘settlement’—yet they do not purport to have found, or even anticipate finding, an endpoint to this dance.

This thesis proposes a viewing of portraiture through the conceptualisation and consciousness of diaspora. The thesis is divided into two sections: a creative body of original artwork and a supporting exegesis. The practice-based part of the thesis presents collective, non-essentialised portraits in the form of installations comprising works-on-paper and artist’s books, while the exegesis investigates artistic and intellectual perspectives on portraiture in light of some contemporary thinking on diaspora theory and experience. Together, the two parts of the thesis propose a re-visioning and “rethinking” of the relationship between portraiture, diaspora and subjectivity that shifts the function of the portrait from a referential to a performative role, finding significance not in the fixed identity of a sitter/subject, but in the relational and collective subjectivities forged between artist, subject and viewer. By positioning portraiture alongside diaspora, I have explored notions that arise from shared experiences of diaspora, drawing on the critical vocabulary of postmodernist cultural discourses of globalisation and dispersion while examining how contemporary portraiture can reflect such an understanding of the world, and in particular how it interacts with and “thinks through” notions of identity, subjectivity and representation.

This dissertation will examine the relationship between the narrative styles of the art cinema and those of mainstream contemporary American cinema. In particular: it will focus on a unique style of narration used in the art cinema since the early decades of the 20th century, contending that “multiform narrative”—a concept adopted from the work of Janet Murray—offers a useful framework for analyzing this style. The key structural features of the “multiform narrative” are its multiple narrative strands and multiple ontologies, and it is the latter feature that sets it apart from other narrative styles. It will argue that “multiform narratives” differ from the unified narratives of classical Hollywood cinema in their use of multiple narrative strands. However, they also differ from multi-strand narratives of American independent cinema in their use of multiple realities. The usefulness of the “multiform” as a category will be demonstrated through a consideration of a diverse group of films ranging from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Weine, 1919) to Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa, 1951), as well as through contemporary multiple-ontology films such as Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001), Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004). These contemporary films share many narrative and aesthetic characteristics of the earlier multiform films that have become exemplars of “modernist” and/or “art cinema,” even though they have emerged from very different social and institutional contexts. In this respect, the category of the “multiform” will be shown to offer both a flexibility and specificity that is not provided by earlier concepts. Consequently, it provides a framework for analyzing films from different movements and time periods with similar narrative structures that have yet to be considered together on this basis. As a result, the multiform will be shown to close a research gap in the field of complex narrative in the cinema and to provide a helpful refinement to the evolving taxonomy of narrative forms. In addition, it will be argued that a further distinction can be made within the category of the multiform itself through the identification of a style of multiform film that uses subjective realist narration to create its alternate ontological levels. Subjective realism presents the internal world of a character as if it were as real as other levels of narration and, in the films that will be considered, subjective realist strands are used to represent the dreams, hallucinations, and/or lying flashbacks of key characters within the films. A historical overview of subjective realist multiform cinema from 1919 to the present will be offered, and it will be argued that the innovative and challenging contemporary films which employ this narrative structure are aesthetically and narratively indebted to their precursors in the art cinema, but are also informed by recent technological developments as well as contemporary production and reception contexts. They will be shown to be part of a cycle of films emerging in the mid-1990s that has offered multiplex audiences narrative pleasures of the type formerly reserved for the denizens of art house cinema.

Obscenities offstage is conceived and designed as a study in performance. It is alert to the dangers inherent in positing erotic fields, especially so-called 'gay saunas', as objects of study, dangers that have dogged the scientific research, both qualitative and quantitative, undertaken in this field since the 1960s. The dangers arise precisely because the positing of the sauna as a coherent unitary object to be studied by the researcher as a coherent unitary subject naturalises a discrete relation that is in effect utterly bogus. The project reconfigures the epistemic stage of sauna research. It recognises that the scene of the gay sauna resists anything more than incomplete, inconclusive or reductive representation, not through some teleological or mystificatory agency, but simply because it is technically, that is, materially and socially, designed to do so. With its focus on producing effects of ambiguity, anonymity, darkness, disorientation, excitation, hermeticism, muteness, obscurity, seclusion and synaesthesia, on producing these effects as the commodities on which its commercial viability effectively depends, the gay sauna can be recognised as a zone in which the knowledge sought by the physical and human sciences is necessarily and always located just out of reach, offstage. Performance as an episteme [sic] offers methodological opportunities here that have hitherto been unexplored. Performance produces effects of knowledge not in spite of but through the production, articulation, shimmer and play of contingent reality effects, and importantly for this project through an ontological intervention that deconstructs the 'naturalised' opposition of absence and presence. It is with the commonplace performative force known as 'offstage'—in Latin, obscaenus—that the current project strives to know the gay sauna, and yet let it remain 'obscene'.

This thesis examines the ways in which the process of exhibition development and the politics this involves affects the practice of history in the museum. It does this by establishing the broad parameters of history practice in the museum and places this in relation to academic practice, focusing on the New Zealand context and specifically upon Auckland War Memorial Museum. From this basis the thesis examines the development of City exhibition at Auckland Museum as a large-scale museum history exposition. The development process for this exhibition was created with the aim of changing the traditional Museum approach so as to create a more engaging and scholarly history exhibition than is traditional. At the same time however, there was also an aim of retaining the appearance of the traditional Museum within this programme of change. These aims were to be met by the innovation of the collaboration between an academic historian and the Museum's practitioners in the development process.The research is based upon a detailed investigation of the roles played by the exhibition team members and the decisions, negotiations and compromises that they made through the development process. Beginning with their original intentions and concepts for the exhibition its metamorphosis into the exhibition as it was installed in the Museum gallery is traced. Emphasis is placed on the resonance that the various decisions and changes carried into the finished exhibition. The findings indicate that the Museum's traditions of developing and displaying knowledge exerted a strong conservative effect over the exhibition development in conflict with the programme of change. This conservatism vied with the authorial intentions of the exhibition development team. As a result of this influence the exhibition developed leant towards the conventional. The unexpectedly orthodox outcome resulted from the absence of critical museological practice. The thesis argues that although Auckland Museum had undergone extensive restructuring, including the introduction of new exhibition development processes and a new outlook as an organisation, the conception of history in the Museum had not changed. Ultimately this precluded that the practice of history in the institution would advance through the revised exhibition development process. However, the development of City did help achieve the updating of social history in the Museum and remains a platform upon which a more critical approach to the past can be built.