The thesis addresses a mode of visual art criticism that it characterizes as “antipodal”. Antipodality is a false image of the world, a phantasm. An antipodal simulacrum could be described by what Jurgis Baltrusaitus has called a “depraved perspective”, which is a procedure of investigation dominated by the passion to objectify the empirical sign in a conceit of perverse logic. A perspective rendering taken to literalist excess (comparable to the literalising of figurative language) causes anomalies in and corruptions of what is depicted. The invention of the antipodes by cartographers of early modern Europe—a “logical” necessity of mapping that then required discovery of the antipodal land as a lost object—might be such an instance of a depraved perspective. In Baltrusaitus’s terms, we could say such depravity produces an “aberration” in the manner of the optical phenomenon in which a celestial body is apparently displaced and viewed as if it were elsewhere. Such an aberration forms the thematic content of this thesis; content which is the proposition of an aberrant critical conceit of “antipodality” as a simulacrum. This was a formative concept for my own activity of art criticism, in that it allowed a defining moment for an Australian postmodernism (notably in the 1980s) as an evacuated sign-system of art, a styling of art as pseudo-art. But it has acquired a trajectory for art criticism beyond the definition of Australian postmodern style. An antipodal art criticism is likewise a pseudo-criticism, that’s to say, it is a performative enunciation of falseness: it addresses a pseudo-object. Like the antipodes, art is a necessary fiction for criticism, a lost object that needs to be discovered. The most potent pseudo-art for Australian postmodernism was kitsch, and its style was camp. For contemporary art criticism, however, in a digital era, the most potent pseudo-art is pornography, notably digital pornography. Kitsch is the simulacrum of aesthetic form. Pornography is the simulacrum of eroticism. The thesis develops a critical discussion of works of art through the perverse logic of pornography as a depraved perspective. In this respect, “antipodality” provides the conceptual structure of this thesis, which polemically reflects on art criticism and the simulacrum through the media of visual art, film and literature. In a specific Australian context, the thesis discusses the work of Imants Tillers and Lindy Lee as oeuvres that have dealt with the false identity of the artist as originator of their performative but empty signature styles. The pornographic impulse of antipodality is dealt with through other modes of self-portraiture and performativity, notably in three generations of photographic technique and genre: Diane Arbus, Merry Alpern and Natacha Merritt. The performative nature of a pseudo-art is correlative to the performativity of pornography as pseudo-eroticism: both render dubious any authenticity of the desire motivating the performances. The thesis examines in detail three instances of falsely performative identities in film: the alluring and haunted figure of Madeleine in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo; the ingenue, picaresque protagonist of Roger Vadim’s sci-fi fantasy Barbarella; and Gough Lewis’s humanistic documentary on a porn star whose notoriety derived from subjecting herself to “the world’s largest gang bang”, Sex: The Annabel Chong Story. Each of these cinematic portraits operates, with varying degrees and moments of artifice, a metafictional transgression of figural borders. This strategy as a type of erotic theatricality is considered in detail with, among other passing examples, two celebrated short works of libertine literature (by Vivant Denon and Jean-François de Bastide); two paintings—one by nineteenth-century French academic artist Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, the other by the quite un-academic painter Pierre Bonnard; and with an erotic, theatrical innovation called the “Attitude”, introduced by Emma Hamilton as an amateur drawing room entertainment in the late eighteenth century. Hamilton’s captivating tableaux are discussed in terms of the phantasm, and the thesis is inspired by two literary exemplars of phantasmic portraiture: Edgar Allan Poe’s figure of “the man of the crowd” and Guy de Maupassant’s “Horla”. The latter, in particular, is presented as an analogy for the performative effect of antipodal simulacrum of art criticism.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/279281 |
| Creators | Edward Colless |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Detected Language | English |
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