{"title":"The Siren and the Satyr as Spiritual Curatives in Jacob Meydenbach’s Hortus sanitatis","authors":"Catherine Mahoney","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2022.2075607","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2022.2075607","url":null,"abstract":"Medieval herbals were encyclopedic medicinal compilations that detailed the physical structure and therapeutic properties of a wide range of plants, animals, and minerals. These books were essential to the practice of medieval physicians and herbalists, who often cultivated or collected their own medicinal specimens for use in the treatment of patients. 1 A fifteenth-century printed herbal held in the University of Melbourne ’ s Baillieu Library Rare Books Collection has been identified through examination of a hand-written inscription as a first edition Hortus sanitatis , published in 1491 by the Mainz printer Jacob Meydenbach. 2 The 1491 edition is the only one produced by Meydenbach, although three more economical editions were published by the printer Johann Pr € uss, who reduced the amount of paper required by using a smaller type and increasing the lines in each column of text. The Baillieu acquired its copy of the Hortus in 1903 and, prior to conservation treatment at the University ’ s Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, the book was in extremely fragile condition and missing its original binding and title page. 3 Containing only 386 of the original 454 leaves, the copy is imperfect; it retained, however, two alphabetised indices, several hundred hand-coloured woodcut illustrations, and a number of annotations in a later hand. 4 Many of the taxonomic entries in Meydenbach ’ s Hortus were Latin translations from a 1485 German-language compilation (also known as Hortus sanitatis, or Garten der Gesundheit ) by the printer Peter Sch € offer (c. 1425 – c. 1503), who was employed in the workshop of Johannes Gutenberg. 5 Unlike Sch € offer ’ s herbal, how-ever, Meydenbach ’ s version introduced a variety of fantastical and monstrous fauna, including the unicorn, the dragon, the manticore, the satyr, and the siren. Ostensibly a book of popular medicine, Meydenbach ’ s Hortus aligned itself closely with the tradition of the Christian bestiary, wherein the characteristics of various animals and monsters provided a didactic","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46673653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848–2020)","authors":"C. De Lorenzo","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2022.2076037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2022.2076037","url":null,"abstract":"As long ago as 2007 Florence Derieux was able to claim that ‘the art history of the second half of the twentieth century is no longer a history of artworks, but a history of exhibitions’. Exhibition histories allow a shift away from individual works, artists or art movements, to contingences across space that also invite social and political critique. In Australia, while there have been many studies of exhibitions at home and abroad, it is only relatively recently that an examination of the impact of art exhibitions on art history has been undertaken. Unlike some of these recent studies that embraced exhibitions across multiple media, Daniel Palmer and Martyn Jolly’s Installation View: Photography Exhibitions in Australia (1848-2020), focuses on a single medium, photography, albeit in many permutations over the last 170 years. Installation View draws the reader’s attention to the ways in which photography has been exhibited, and in so doing steps aside from the usual run of photography monographs on individuals, technologies or collections. It would seem that the first exhibition of photography for other than commercial gain was in 1854 when the Australian Museum enabled local audiences to preview diverse works, including daguerreotypes, from the colonies of Victoria and New South Wales before despatching them to the Exposition Universelle (1855) in Paris. By the final chapters, and there are 37 in all, the reader is reminded that photographers have long used posters, billboards, electronic screens and projections to take photography into the streets. The narrative centres on visual records of exhibitions; in the authors’ own words, it is ‘driven by installation photographs’ sourced from institutional and private archives. Arranged roughly chronologically, the visual material in each chapter is supported by mini chapters, or ‘vignettes’, ranging from less than 400 words to maybe 3,000. To document photo exhibitions from 1854 to 2020 is no mean feat, and it is very likely that established scholars in the field will encounter new information. While the specific focus perpetuates a separation of photography from other art forms, it also enables a vastly more comprehensive account of photography exhibitions than is possible in cross-media studies. Even so, a predilection for a single (if not singular) medium warrants a sustained argument, one that takes into account the very disciplinary-diverse readership and scholarship on photo histories. It may be that researchers across the humanities and the social sciences find","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47634092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Peripatetic Virgin: A Seventeenth-Century Ivory Carving from Manila in the National Gallery of Victoria","authors":"Matthew Martin","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2022.2076034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2022.2076034","url":null,"abstract":"In 1939, the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) became the beneficiary of a rich private collecting legacy—the bequest of Mr Howard Spensley (1870–1938) of Westoning Manor, Bedfordshire. Howard Spensley was born in Melbourne in 1870, the son of the Hon. Howard Spensley (1834–1902), solicitor general of Victoria in 1871–72, commissioner for Victoria to the London exhibition of 1873, and MP for Finsbury Central in 1885–86. The younger Spensley was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, and became a barrister, with chambers in the Inner Temple. Before moving to Westoning in 1905, when he bought Westoning Manor, he lived in London and travelled widely, particularly to Egypt and Australia, where he had business interests. He was an avid collector, with wide-ranging tastes, and he assembled an impressive collection of paintings, drawings, sculptures, antiquities, bronzes, ceramics, glass, and furniture, the details of which, including date and place of purchase and the amount paid, he meticulously recorded in a handwritten catalogue. Those records are held in the rare books collection of the Shaw Research Library at the NGV, in Melbourne. Spensley died on 3 March 1938, bequeathing his art collection to the NGV. This group of nearly 800 artworks was transformative in a number of areas of the Melbourne art museum’s collection, especially the small group of Italian Renaissance maiolica works and the large group of Renaissance bronzes, mortars, and plaquettes. Among the bequeathed works was a collection of some sixteen ivory objects of various dates and places of origin, including a 1714 portrait bust of Isaac Newton by David le Marchand (4118-D3), perhaps the most significant work in this group. But it is another of these ivory works that concerns us here (fig. 1). Spensley’s catalogue entry describes the work thus:","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2022-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45116623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett","authors":"P. Hoffie","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2021.1992729","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2021.1992729","url":null,"abstract":"The psychological self-portraiture running beneath so much of Gordon Bennett’s work was there in the first room. As was the historical revisionism. As was the post-colonial intervention. As was the artist’s critical responsiveness to so many of the racially divisive and damaging frameworks through which we construct our daily lives. Any number of possible narratives could have been used to structure this exhibition. But curator Zara Stanhope’s curatorial openness and her choice of chronological order provided full scope for the multi-layered, contradictory shifts in Bennett’s imaginary to speak clearly about the ambivalence from which they were born and the history of their imagining. The artist rapidly moved from the chance-game of letting an image evolve as if of its own volition, towards a system of representation where he was in full curatorial/artistic control. Bennett understood that, for his particular task, ‘art’ could not be separated from the order or structure of ‘language’. The first two rooms of the exhibition reveal how early he developed the themes that he would ‘worry’ productively about over his 25-year career. These earlier works, which laid bare the complex frameworks of ideas and imagery with transparently painful personal evidence, were soon left behind as the artist moved towards more controlled and strategic tactics in what was for him a game of emotional, psychological and racial life-and-death. Two images in the first room of the exhibition expose the deep uncertainties at the core of his work. In Untitled (Nuance) (1992), a strip of eight black and white self-portraits run above a grey-scale of seven rectangles spelling out the word ‘nuance’. In the first, the artist’s own face stares back at the camera over a rectangle of black. Presented with full-frontal, no-frills directness, it could be a mug shot or an anthropological study of an Australian Aboriginal male. Or both. In the succession of seven images that follow, it is unclear whether the subject is applying or removing the skin-like mask that adheres to his face. As Gordon well knew, in Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon speaks of the ‘epidermalization’ of the ‘black man’s’ ‘inferiority complex’. As if the skin itself binds the fixity of identity into being. But Fanon, a Lacanian psychoanalyst, also identifies the ‘massive psycho-existential complex’ emerging ‘from the juxtaposition of the white and black races’, and his analysis in that book focused on unravelling this complex.","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48779660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Silent Witnesses: Doris Salcedo and Blanchot","authors":"T. Juliff","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2021.1992721","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2021.1992721","url":null,"abstract":"Maurice Blanchot’s sparse 1994 text The Instant of My Death re-tells a story that intersects at the moment of gunshots and silences. Relating to an event in Nazioccupied France, the story is located where ontological certainties embedded in the silences are made insecure by the traumatic nature of the events that they are called upon to verify. In the story, a young man is faced with imminent death by a firing squad. He is saved, however, when his enemies are momentarily distracted and a Russian soldier tells him to ‘disappear’. As a result, the young man is saved to live with the uncanny feeling of having survived his death as well as the guilt at the death of his neighbours who did not share his good fortune. The three voices of Blanchot’s text, that of the narrator, that of the young man, and that of Blanchot himself, make the idea of a singular viewpoint problematic and blur the boundaries of identity. Who is the young man? At the same time, the affective impact of the event, ‘this unanalyzable feeling’, plays havoc with conventional temporal progression, placing death and the overcoming of the fear of death, or ‘perhaps already the step beyond’, in the middle of life. If the young man hears the thud of bodies falling beside him, he is—albeit momentarily—alive. No thud: dead. It is not the presence of gunshot but, rather, the absence of a fall that marks out death. The man survives as a witness of his own death, and as the blindfolded witness of the death of others. This auditory witnessing, or hearing of silences, haunts the young man, who lives the rest of his life, or should it be the rest of his death, awaiting the thud. Blanchot’s text reminds us that the witnessing of death might not require the visual evidence of absence. In the case of many ‘forcibly disappeared’ people in the Latin American context, this silence is a double-witness. It is the absence of the ‘thud’—the fall to the ground—that we witness. This sense of listening to that silence runs strongly","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43947653","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Goitres, Growths, and Distortions: Rodin’s Balzac in Melbourne","authors":"David M. Challis","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2021.1992725","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2021.1992725","url":null,"abstract":"From the moment Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) first exhibited his monument to the French author Honor e de Balzac at the 1898 Salon in Paris, it became the subject of ridicule and controversy (fig. 1). The daily newspaper Le Gaulois exclaimed, ‘Help me find something beautiful in these goiters, these growths, these hysterical distortions!’ The commissioning body for the monument, the Paris-based literary union Soci et e des Gens de Lettres, famously claimed it could not recognise the author Balzac in the sculpture and refused to accept or pay for it. Rodin responded by withdrawing the sculpture from the exhibition and transporting it back to his studio, where it remained until after his death. In 1955, more than half a century later, Balzac experienced an entirely different reception when it was welcomed into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the press release announcing the arrival of the sculpture, Alfred Barr, the museum’s director, declared that it was ‘one of the very great sculptures in the entire history of Western art’. This article examines the dramatic reversal in the critical appreciation of Balzac, which precipitated its acquisition by the Felton Bequest on behalf of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 1964. The NGV’s campaign to acquire Balzac was not without its own controversies, and these are explored in detail using unpublished archival correspondence and gallery records from the 1960s. Unfortunately, the sculpture courtyard where Balzac was originally exhibited at the NGV’s then new St Kilda Road building was later abandoned, consigning the sculpture to relative obscurity in the gallery’s rear garden. More recent scholarship on Rodin’s late-career sculptures has provided new insights into the interconnection between his use of materiality, the object nature of sculpture, and the foregrounding of the artist through performative markings. An exploration of these themes in relation to Rodin’s Balzac provides a new reason for the NGV to celebrate its status as one of the departure points for the early twentieth-century turn toward modern sculpture.","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41548978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Obituary: Michael Jagamara Nelson (c. 1947-2020) “Without the story the painting is nothing”","authors":"Vivien Johnson","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2021.1992730","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2021.1992730","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45000208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Xerox Memory: Lindy Lee’s Photocopies","authors":"Sophie Rose","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2021.1992723","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2021.1992723","url":null,"abstract":"In one of the earliest critical texts on Lindy Lee, Rex Butler allegorised the Brisbane-born artist’s use of photocopies through Jorge Luis Borges’s short story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’. Borges’s story-cum-thought-experiment is as follows: the protagonist, Pierre Menard, pledges to write the seventeenth-century masterpiece Don Quixote—not to adapt it, nor to mechanically copy it, but to arrive at the novel independently and fully, three centuries later. On paper, Menard is a deranged plagiarist, yet through his ‘deliberate anachronism and fallacious attribution’, he produces a genuinely novel framing of the text. There is something of Menard in Lee’s fuzzy carbon copies. By borrowing from a bank of artistic ‘masters’, she untethers the historical image from its author and bestows it with new signification. But there is another story by Borges, equally pertinent to Lee’s work. ‘Funes the Memorious’ tells the tale of the extraordinary man Ireneo Funes who, after a riding injury, could remember every moment of his past in excruciating detail. Memory paralysed him. Not only did he remember every object he encountered but the quality of that object from all angles, at all times of day. He remembered his own face so accurately that he was startled by the microscopic evidence of ageing reflected in the mirror each morning. He learnt English, French, Portuguese, and Latin within days but, finding them all unsatisfactory in describing his plethora of experiences, he created his own mad language in which every memory was catalogued with an arbitrary number or word. Funes’s absolute recall of the world meant that he could not understand it. No patterns emerged in the ‘garbage heap’ of his mind, so that childhood memories were tangled with events just past, as each moment hauled him into an unfamiliar mass of sensation. In the story of Funes we find a strange but irrefutable lesson: that to make sense of the past, we must, at some level, forget it. In the late 1980s, Lee began a long series of appropriative works using the Xerox photocopier, which was to become her signature medium during the 1990s and early 2000s. During this time Lee also applied black wax onto brightly painted canvases: carving out the outlines of historical artworks from the dark, viscous substance. Cousins of the Xerox works and equally arresting, these two-tonal canvases are, sadly, outside the scope of this essay. In subsequent decades, the artist","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48461591","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Frame-work: Borders and the Limits of Representation in Recent Paintings by Peter Adsett","authors":"M. Lee","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2021.1992724","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2021.1992724","url":null,"abstract":"almost monochrome. As a former assistant to another lawman, Rover Thomas, Dirrji painted flat passages of red, black, and white pigment (omitting the yellow on this occasion). In the seventh painting, All Different Languages for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal People, seventeen red or black ovoid shapes are surrounded by white pigment. Beyond that, a red and black border follows the canvas edge. This has an important dual function: it not only frames the white ‘ground’ but it also sinks below it to suggest a subterranean layer (see fig. 4). Figure 4. Two Laws, One Big Spirit series: Dirrji (Rusty Peters), All Different Languages for Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal People (left), 2000, natural ochre on linen, 135 122 cm; and Peter Adsett, Number Eight (right), 2000, acrylic on linen, 135 122 cm. Grantpirrie Collection, NSW. Photo: courtesy of Grantpirrie Collection. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, vol. 21, no. 2","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42634599","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The War Itself: Cornelia Parker’s Official Election Art, Post-2016 Democracy and the Weaponisation of Social Media","authors":"Kit Messham-Muir","doi":"10.1080/14434318.2021.1992720","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14434318.2021.1992720","url":null,"abstract":"Introduction When a snap general election was called in the United Kingdom in 2017, Cornelia Parker, one of that nation’s most prominent and celebrated contemporary artists dealing often in war and conflict, was appointed as the official British election artist. The 2017 election followed less than a year after the 2016 Brexit referendum, as the Conservative government, committed to making good on the outcome of the 2016 referendum, hoped to have elected more pro-Brexit MPs into the House of Commons in an attempt to push through Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal with the European Union. The plan backfired, forcing May into leading a minority government, the second in a decade. This further prolonged and intensified the political turbulence and eventually led to May’s tearful resignation in 2019 and yet another general election later that year, called by the new prime minister, Boris Johnson. The 2016 Brexit referendum is commonly recognised as one of the most fierce and toxic votes in modern British history. Its campaigns were marked by widespread and blatant disinformation, overt ethno-nationalist politics, and the violent assassination of the pro-Remain MP Jo Cox. With the election following barely one year after the Brexit vote, and being triggered by the political impossibility of delivering the outcome of the referendum, Parker may well have felt more like an official war artist than an official election artist. Parker created two significant video works as the 2017 election artist. The first was Left Right & Centre (2017) (fig. 1), a haunting and aesthetically rich work shot mostly by drone in the chamber of Britain’s House of Commons, the democratically elected lower house of government. The work depicts the dispatch boxes at the centre of the Commons chamber stacked with various British daily newspapers, representing the left, right and centre of British politics. The drone’s rotors stir up the pages of the newspapers until the entire chamber is chaotically littered in drifts of newsprint. Parker’s other work, Election Abstract (2017),","PeriodicalId":29864,"journal":{"name":"Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2021-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42614096","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}