MONSTER ISLAND:

A tale of contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity and its descent from the spectre of colonial convict history

SHANNON FIELD SHEPPARD-SIMMS

A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

UNSW Art and Design University of New South Wales April 2016 THESIS / DISSERTATION SHEET

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Surname or Family name: SHEPPARD-SIMMS

First name: SHANNON Other name/s: FIELD

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School: UNSW ART AND DESIGN Faculty: UNSW ART AND DESIGN

Title: Monster Island: A tale of contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity and its descent from the spectre of colonial convict history.

This thesis addresses the manner in which the European Australian psyche is haunted by questions of origin, place and identity. Structured equally between a written dissertation and a visual practice, the reproduction of the national and individual subject is located around questions of narrative, memory and mimetic identity. The thesis explores these questions through the relationship between contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity and the historical form of the colonial convict. The figure of the convict is used as a means of deconstructing the contemporary performance of Australian gender and national identity. In this dissertation the critical force of the convict is located around the conflation of the Gothic and the monstrous with the convict form.

The contention of this dissertation is that the representation of convict identity and masculinity as monstrous and deviant established a gendered template, which continues to impact upon contemporary Australian masculinity. The process of exploring this relationship is located at the intersection of gender, history, and colonialism. At this juncture a gap in the current research exists between the gendered analyses of convict masculinity on the one hand and the research examining contemporary Australian masculinity on the other. Situated within the vernacular articulation of modernity, the visual practice is a material expression of the ideological properties that navigate within and across the everyday.

Working within an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach my thesis draws upon various cultural forms to discuss the spectral fragmentation of the monstrous convict body. This method of critical comparative analysing enables my thesis to foreground the manner in which Australian masculinity continues to be haunted by the fracturing and marginalisation of convict identity. However, the thesis concludes by arguing that the negative significance of difference, located around Australian national identity and contemporary heterosexual masculinity, is today open to being re-imagined. In re-configuring the colonial subject within a positive, postcolonial signification of difference, a space of productive becoming opens up; permitting the marginalised ruin of convict masculinity to contest the univocal reification of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity in Australia.

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ii ORIGINALITY STATEMENT

‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledge- ment is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project’s design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

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iii COPYRIGHT STATEMENT

‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents the right to archive and to make available my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known, subject to the provisions of the Copyright Act 1968. I retain all proprietary rights, such as patent rights. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation.

I also authorise University Microfilms to use the 350 word abstract of my thesis in Dis- sertation Abstract International (this is applicable to doctoral theses only).

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iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The journey to complete this PhD has only been made possible through the support both directly and indirectly of a large group of people. Although I ended up finishing the last part of this journey in Tasmania; my entire undergraduate and much of my post-graduate experience was spent with great pleasure at COFA. I would like to begin then by thanking a number of COFA people who over the course of this period went out of their way to help and encourage me. First off the rank I’d like to say thanks to those two sculpture expects Jim Ward and Francois Breuillaud-Limondin, your support and advice was always sought after and it was always a pleasure to drop in and chat with you guys,. Similarly I’d like to thank Mike Kempson and Rafael Butron for your help and advice concerning all things to do with printmaking. To Penelope Benton, I’d like to say thank you for your ongoing work in providing the students of COFA with support, with the artspace Kudos and most importantly with the Ute (thank goodness for that Ute!).

To Vaughan Rees thanks for your good humour, positive support and boisterous laugh. To Joanna Elliot I would like to give a special thanks for all the advice that has helped me to navigate through the world of university documentation. To Sylvia Ross thank you for your generous help when I first returned to COFA. A big hello and thanks must also go to the wonderful Judy Haywood. Truly my PhD thesis would have not been the same without your help, so thanks again Judy.

To my supervisors Peter Sharp and David McNeill thank you both for all your support and advice over the years, without your input this PhD would not be what it is. You both always made the time to provide me with the help and assistance I needed when it was most required.

Finally there are three special people who all have helped me with the PhD. First of all I would like to thank my wonderful daughter Sienna, whose inquisitive mind and love of muddy puddles has brought countless moments of joy over the last two years.

v Next I need to thank my mother for her tireless support with editing and re-editing the dissertation, without your help I would still be writing and correcting this crazy thing. Thanks again for all your support mum. Finally and most importantly of all, I thank my wonderful wife Emma, this PhD is yours as much as it is mine. Without your continued support and encouragement it wouldn’t have been possible to finish this massive project. In circumstances that have been difficult and challenging you have gone above and beyond in helping me to complete something we could easily have put aside and moved on from. Your help and support have been an inspiration.

This thesis is dedicated to my beautiful, courageous and wonderful Emma.

vi ABSTRACT

This thesis addresses the manner in which the European Australian psyche is haunted by questions of origin, place and identity. Structured equally between a written dissertation and a visual practice, the reproduction of the national and individual subject is located around questions of narrative, memory and mimetic identity. The thesis explores these questions through the relationship between contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity and the historical form of the colonial convict. In looking to unpack this relationship, the figure of the convict is used as a means of deconstructing the contemporary performance of Australian gender and national identity. In this dissertation the critical force of the convict is located around the conflation of the Gothic and the monstrous with the convict form.

The contention of this dissertation is that the representation of convict identity and masculinity as monstrous and deviant established a gendered template, which continues to impact upon contemporary Australian masculinity. The process of exploring this relationship is located at the intersection of gender, history, and colonialism. At this juncture a gap in the current research exists between the gendered analyses of convict masculinity, on the one hand, and the research examining contemporary Australian masculinity on the other. In both modes of research the ideological mechanism of representation and mimesis that underscore Australia’s unsettled post-colonial identity are explored through a material, haptic methodology. This material approach locates the traumatic rupture associated with the exile and representation of convict masculinity, as monstrous within the material form of the vernacular and the everyday. Situated within the vernacular articulation of modernity, the visual practice is a material expression of the ideological properties that navigate within and across the everyday. Both the dissertation and the visual practice look to situate these thematic concerns within a pedagogic approach that links the theory to the practice through a form of text-based materiality.

vii Working within an interdisciplinary and intermedial approach my thesis draws upon various cultural forms to discuss the spectral fragmentation of the monstrous convict body. This method of critical comparative analysing enables my thesis to foreground the manner in which Australian masculinity continues to be haunted by the fracturing and marginalisation of convict identity. However, the thesis concludes by arguing that the negative significance of difference, located around Australian national identity and contemporary heterosexual masculinity, is today open to being re-imagined. In re-configuring the colonial subject within a positive, postcolonial signification of difference, a space of productive becoming opens up; permitting the marginalised ruin of convict masculinity to contest the univocal reification of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity in Australia.

viii TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE

Thesis Dissertation Sheet ...... ii Originality Statement ...... iii Copyright and Authenticity Statements ...... iv Acknowledgements ...... v Abstract ...... vii List of Illustrations ...... xii Introduction ...... 14

Chapter One:

Gendering the text: Theory - Literature Review - Approaches to Research...... 19 1.1 Masculinities, the monster and the thing: theories of gender ...... 21 1.2 Convict masculinities: a review of the literature ...... 28 1.3 An interdisciplinary moment with Walter Benjamin ...... 38 1.4 Haunted histories: when memory and trauma collide ...... 41 1.5 Thinking in images: approaches to visual research ...... 46 1.6 Material matters: affect and representation ...... 54 1.7 Image and text: structuring the dissertation ...... 59

Chapter Two:

Tales of the Unexpected: When Convicts Colonise the Future...... 62 2.1 Cannibal conversations ...... 65 2.2 Stop motion or blasting with Benjamin ...... 69 2.3 Paper cuts ...... 75 2.4 Convict porn stars ...... 81 2.5 There be monsters ...... 87 2.6 Un-natural lives ...... 90 2.7 Lest we forget ...... 93

ix TABLE OF CONTENTS (Continued) PAGE

2.8 Bad boy, bad boy ...... 100 2.9 Grand tours ...... 104 2.10 The sleep of reason ...... 107

Chapter Three: Fragments of a Suburban Dream ...... 110 3.1 The invisible men ...... 112 3.2 Benjamin’s ghost ...... 117 3.3 The man next door: Juan Davila ...... 120

3.4 Convict vagabonds ...... 127 3.5 Boys don’t cry ...... 131 3.6 Machine dreams ...... 137 3.7 Shadow play ...... 140 3.8 Retail therapy ...... 143 3.9 There’s no place like home ...... 147

Chapter Four: From Deserts Monsters Come ...... 152 4.1 Melancholic monsters ...... 155 4.2 Strange scribblings ...... 158 4.3 Man crush ...... 161 4.4 The politics of skin ...... 163 4.5 Mr Nolan I presume? ...... 166 4.6 Heads or tales ...... 173 4.7 The ragman ...... 176 4.8 Let’s talk video ...... 180 4.9 Minstrel Kelly, Minstrel Max ...... 185 4.10 The boulevard of broken dreams ...... 188 4.11 Taylor un/made ...... 193

x TABLE OF CONTENTS (Continued) PAGE

Chapter Five: The Visual Gaze - Practices of Art and Masculinity...... 200 5.1 You take ideology, I’ll take representation ...... 202 5.2 Island hopping ...... 204 5.3 If ever my dreams should stutter ...... 206 5.4 Singing karaoke ...... 209 5.5 Minor major ...... 213 5.6 Talking trash: conversations with a convict vampire ...... 219 5.7 Origin of species ...... 226

Conclusion ...... 232

Bibliography ...... 237

xi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE

Figure 1. Sally Smart, The Exquisite Pirate (South China Sea), 2007, Detail. Mixed media, size variable. In Artist profile: Melbourne Art Fair Special. Edited by Owen craven, photography Daniel Sipp, 70 (Issue 19) 2012...... 77

Figure 2. Sally Smart, Shadow Farm, 2001-2004, Detail. Mixed media, size variable. In Shadow Farm. Exhibition. Wollongong: Wollongong City Gallery, 2003. Http://www.sallysmart.com/cms-work/shadow-farm.index. phps...... 79

Figure 3. Shannon Field1, The Cinematic Remains of a Convict Porn-Star: Part 3, 2014. Mixed media, 44 x 59cm. Photographed by the artist...... 83

Figure 4. Shannon Field, The Cinematic Remains of a Convict Porn-Star: Part 5, 2014. Mixed media, 44 x 59cm. Photographed by the artist...... 85

Figure 5. Adam Cullen, Beezlebozo (Lubricated Goat), 2003. Acrylic on canvas, 183 x 183cm. In Adam Cullen: Macmillan Mini-Art Series No.7. Ken McGregor, Janet Hawley and Jenny Zimmer, 55. South Yarra, Melbourne: Macmillan Art Publishing, 2009...... 102

Figure 6. Shannon Field, What Goes on Tour, Stays on Tour: A convict zombie’s journey across Van Diemen’s Land - part one, 2013. Mixed media, 35 x 46 x 37cm. Photographed by the artist...... 105

Figure 7. Juan Davila, Fable of Australian Painting, 1983. Detail. Oil on canvas, 274 x 1096 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, JW Power Bequest. In Juan Davila. Guy Brett and Roger Benjamin with writings by Juan Davila. Carlton, 96-98. Victoria: The Miegunyah Press, 2006...... 122

1 Shannon Field is the artist pseudonym employed by the author of this dissertation, Shannon Field Sheppard-Simms. xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (Continued) PAGE

Figure 8. Shannon Field, The Day of the Convict Vagabonds scene 3, 2012. Photo-media, 59x 84cm. Photographed by the artist...... 128

Figure 9. Kara Walker, Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, By Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored, 1997. Cut paper and adhesive on wall, size variable. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In Kara Walker: Pictures From Another Time, edited by Annette Dixon, 36. New York: The Regents of the University of Michigan, 2002...... 142

Figure 10. Shannon Field, Window Shopping: A Phantasmagorical Guide for Talking to Convicts (Convict Sculpture 1), 2012/2013. Detail. Mixed media sculpture, size variable. Photographed by the artist...... 144

Figure 11. Sidney Nolan, Ned Kelly, 1946. Ripolin enamel on hardboard, 90.5 x 121.3cm. National Gallery of Australia. In Sidney Nolan: A Retrospective 1917-1992. Exhibition catalogue. Barry Pearce with contributions from Frances Lindsay and Lou Klepac, Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2007...... 169

Figure 12. Shannon Field, Convict Death Head - 1, 2011-12. Mixed media on plywood, 40 x 25 x 30cm. Photographed by the artist...... 173

Figure 13. Shaun Gladwell, “Apology to Roadkill: Daydream Mine Road,” 2007. Type-C print, 120 x 120 cm. In The Macquarie Group Collection: The Land And Its Psyche, co-Authored Felicity Fenner, Julian Beaumont and John MacDonald, 85. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2012...... 182

Figure 14. Shannon Field, Give My Regards to Broadway: Fragments of a Lost Convict (part 1), 2012. Spray paint, oil pastel, collage on paper, 42 x 59cm. Photographed by the artist...... 190

xiii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS (Continued) PAGE

Figure 15. Shannon Field, When Convicts Sing Karaoke (part 1), 2011. Mixed media, 58 x 82cm. Photographed by the artist...... 210

Figure 16. TV Moore, Wild Colonial Boy (Kelly), 2001- 2004. Single channel DV/DVD from a series of ten, duration time approximately 3:30 minutes. Video. Museum of Contemporary Art Australia. In The Neddy Project, 2001 – 2004. Roslyn Oxley9 gallery, http://www. roslynoxley9.com.au/artist/67/TV_Moore/409/...... 213

Figure 17. Shannon Field, Convict Nathaniel Lucas’ Thirst for Blood in No Way Inhibited His Cocaine Habit, 2010-11. Appliqué and mixed materials. Photographed by the artist...... 220

Figure 18. Daniel Boyd, King No Beard, 2008. Oil on canvas, 122 x 167.2 cm. In Man: Depicting Contemporary Masculinity. Exhibition catalogue. Curated by Luke Parker, 5. Penrith, Sydney: Penrith Regional Gallery & Lewers Bequest, 2008...... 224

Figure 19. Shannon Field, The Origin of Species: Bust of Convict F. Dowland, 2009-2010. Mixed media, size variable. Photographed by the artist...... 226

xiv INTRODUCTION

15 Late in the month of January 1788, eleven ships sailed into a magnificent harbour the local Aboriginal inhabitants referred to as Cadi.1 For the European exiles on these ships this strange place, at once both home and prison, would soon be referred to as Sydney Cove. This was the first in what would become a procession of fleets, which, between 1788 and 1868, transported approximately 156,998 convicts to Australia as punishment for various crimes committed in England.2 For the Indigenous populace, the transformation of the Antipodes into a penal colony marked the beginning of a horrific and relentless invasion. The displacement and decimation of the Indigenous peoples of Australia as a result of Britain’s annexation are undeniable and the consequences of this colonial event continue to haunt the collective Australian imagination.

However, the violence of this invasion was doubly traumatic because it also marked a moment of physical and semiotic exile that fragmented convict identity. The entrance of the First Fleet into Sydney Harbour on that January day, unleashed a moment of traumatic rupture that irretrievably scarred both the convict and the Indigenous subject. The impact of this traumatic moment upon contemporary Australian identity is the central thematic concern of both this dissertation and the visual practice. Within the context of convict representation, the dissertation explores the ongoing repercussions of this traumatic moment primarily through the relationship between convict masculinity and contemporary European heterosexual masculinity.

Approximately one hundred and eighty two years later, on the 25th of November 1970, a more personal beginning took place; that of my own birth in the Royal North Shore Hospital. Shortly afterwards my family relocated across the harbour, moving into the Glebe housing estate. Space, place and time have wondrous and mysterious properties. Glebe like the other inner city suburbs that immediately surround Sydney Harbour, is made of hills whose sandstone geography folds in and over itself, drawing

1 Tim Flannery, “The Sandstone City,” in The Birth Of Sydney, ed. Tim Flannery (London: William Heinemann, 2003), 18.

2 Figures provided by Evans and Thorpe from “Commanding men: masculinities and the convict system,” The Journal of Australian Studies 22, no. 56 (1998): 18, http://dx.doi. org/10.1080/14443059809387358. 16 you down towards Circular Quay, towards Sydney Cove. This almost gravitational pull is not only spatial but also temporal, moving you back in time the closer you get to the harbour. The presence of Indigenous and European history is imprinted into the surface of the sandstone rocks and coastal outcrops that hug the harbour foreshore. Scattered around the harbour, these indexical marks speak to a spectral space, alive with memories and ghosts. To live and grow up near Sydney Cove then, is in some ways, to stand on a threshold between the past and the present. Today the Tank Stream, which provided the First Fleet its fresh water, lies underneath the city’s towering monuments to global capital and corporate finance. But beneath all that glass and steel, the stream and the past continue to flow into the harbour. Like the Tank Stream the stories of Australia’s colonial history that many would rather remained buried and forgotten, continue to flow into the present, demanding both recognition and restitution.

If the allegorical exchange between Sydney’s past and present, at first glance seems a rather circuitous means of entering into the dissertation, it is because all points of origin, like the one in this discussion, operate across an array of contested spatial and temporal memories. The national self and the personal self are bound inexorably through a complex exchange of stories and myths that inform both our physical and emotional environment. One of the key catalysts driving all such stories is the question of origin and beginnings. Questions such as, “Where do I come from?” and “How did the present come about?” not only generate our sense of national and personal meaning, they also haunt us through their liminal, open-ended ambiguity. The cultural significance associated with both the ending and the beginning of things, is resonant not only because of the innate significance attached to them, but also because we desire them to be innate or essential.

Therefore, questions of origins, real, imagined and desired, occupy half this dissertation. The other half is concerned with gender, particularly as it relates to convict masculinity. Located within this gendered reading of Australian cultural identity, the central question of this thesis is, To what extent, if at all, does Australia’s convict history continue to influence the performance and construction of contemporary Australian 17 heterosexual masculinity? This dissertation argues that the transportation of convicts to Australia is located within a constellation of Gothic narratives associated with social fracture, gendered deviancy and monstrous heterogeneity. These are the narratives that incorporate the founding moment of Australia’s European heritage with England’s perception of convict masculinity as depraved, corrupt and dysfunctional.

The convict form as a performance of monstrous masculinity foregrounds questions of hegemony, repetition and ideology. Unable to conform to the hegemonic model of masculinity, the bourgeois and the upper classes tried to minimise the threat of working class sexuality and gender by depicting the “dangerous classes” as depraved and deviant.3 Like the monsters populating Gothic fiction, convict masculinity was regarded as a hybrid entity that was part human-part beast. The convict’s mimetic performance of masculinity in its excessive theatricality and libidinal sexuality suggested a constituent form of gender made up of various ill-fitting parts.4 Unable to present a unified expression of masculinity, the hybrid heterogeneity of convict masculinity was viewed as a type of contagion that required removal from the body politic. Importantly this monstrous representation of convict masculinity also intersects with Europe’s understanding of Australia or Terra-Australis as the southern land of monstrous inversions, a place where nature itself had been turned upside down.5

The metaphor of the Gothic monster and spectre is used in the dissertation and the visual practice as a means of addressing questions of history, narrative, memory and violence. In looking to unpack these questions, I incorporate contemporary Australian masculinity with Australia’s convict history and the Australian landscape within this thesis. Australian masculinity is intimately tied to both Europe’s historical

3 Thomas Laqueur, “Sex and desire in the Industrial Revolution,” in The Industrial Revolution And British Society, ed. Patrick O’Brien and Roland Quinault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 118.

4 Jose’ B. Monleon, A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 28-29.

5 Bernard Smith, European Visions and the South Pacific 1768-1850: A Study In The History Of Art and Ideas (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 34. 18 representation of Australia, the Great Southern Land, as an inverted, monstrous space and Britain’s articulation of the convict body as the perverted expression of a deviant, misfigured masculinity. The assertion underscoring the dissertation and the visual practice is that both the process of banishment, and the representation of convict masculinity as deviant, established a fractured and dissonant founding moment. Consequently, this ruptured point of national origin has generated a form of cultural trauma which continues to reverberate through both contemporary Australian masculinity as well as Australia’s national identity.

This dissertation is not an empirical exploration of convict history or masculinity. It is not a fixed linear reading of Australia’s colonial history, confined so to speak within a hermetically sealed past. Nor is it an attempt to empirically discover the convict form, as it historically existed. One of the aims of the dissertation is in fact to critique such empirical, truth-based formulations of Australian history. To facilitate this mode of critique, the thesis draws upon both Gothic literature and the cultural analysis of Walter Benjamin to deconstruct the unified empirical reproduction of both Australian history and heterosexual masculinity. Utilising the fragmented, hybrid and heterogenic mechanisms associated with Benjamin’s approach and Gothic literature both the dissertation and the visual research operate as a form of cultural ‘rag-picking’. By scavenging through and stitching together fragments of European Australia’s colonial past, the thesis constructs an alternative Australia, one that runs parallel to our own. In this re-imagined Australia, elements of history, place and gender are structured within a fictional space whereby Australia’s monstrous landscape becomes the topography into which the convict’s failed masculinity is cast. The assertion is that this exchange between environment, narrative and masculinity opens up a space that permits our Gothic/melancholic heritage to traverse from the past to the present, thereby continuing to inform the performance of contemporary Australian masculinity.

19 CHAPTER ONE:

Gendering the text: Theory - Literature Review - Approaches to Research

20 The function of this chapter is to provide an outline of the preoccupations and processes that comprise both the dissertation and the visual practice. The central aim of the dissertation and the visual practice is to address the relationship between convict masculinity and the performance of contemporary Australian heterosexual masculine identity. Intersecting through this investigation into Australian gender are two parallel discussions related to questions of history and national identity. In looking to unpack these concerns this chapter is broadly divided into three sections. The first section provides a background into the development of contemporary gender theory. The second section presents a review into the literature related to convict heterosexual masculinity; and the third section discusses the methodological approaches that underpin the visual practice as research.

Developing from post-feminist theory, gender studies coalesced into an independent academic discipline during the 1990s. As with post-feminist theory, gender theory seeks to deconstruct the naturalised inscription of the subject while critically foregrounding the underlying positions of power related to the reproduction of identity. Both disciplines regard the subject as a fluid, multifaceted entity; one that incorporates performativity, psychology and sexuality1. Not withstanding these sites of commonality, it is important to note that certain feminist positions are not so receptive to gender studies. This response reflects the pluralistic quality of post-structural theory, however it also relates to the field or scope of interest concerning each discipline. Arguably feminism’s primary focus, in the widest sense, relates to the investigation, critique and improvement of the social, political, economic and psychological position of women. Gender theory on the other hand seeks to critically deconstruct all gendered identities, including heterosexual masculinity.2 For some feminist theorists this inclusion of masculinity represents an attempt to reinscribe patriarchal control over the critical

1 Lorraine Nencel, “Heterosexuality,” in A Companion to Gender Studies, ed. Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg, and Audrey Kobayashi (Melbourne: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 136-137.

2 Chris Beasley, “Mind The Gap? Masculinity Studies And Contemporary Gender/Sexuality Thinking,” Australian Feminist Studies 28, no. 75 (2013): 113-114, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08164649. 2013.761949. 21 discipline of feminist thought.

The relationship between heterosexual masculinity and modes of social and cultural power is certainly problematic. Patriarchal social systems have historically favoured the masculine subject over the feminine subject, providing men with more freedom, power and control than women and heterosexual masculinity within feminist theory has either directly or indirectly been located within the hegemonic centre of patriarchal power. In this framework, heterosexual masculinity is perceived not only as a beneficial recipient of power and privilege, but also as the signifying agent occupying and controlling the hegemonic centre. The foregrounding of the systemic inequality present in patriarchal systems is one of the key considerations that has driven feminist social and political action throughout its first, second and third wave development. It has led, within post-industrial states such as Australia, to a raft of social changes that have greatly improved the female subject’s position.

However, the conflation of patriarchy and heterosexual masculinity (the proposition that the masculine subject not only benefits from but also controls the hegemonic centre) has until relatively recently excluded heterosexual masculinity from the same degree of deconstructive scrutiny afforded the female subject. This lack of scrutiny is a situation remarked upon by gender theorists such as Lorraine Nencel3. Yet, even within the field of gender theory, the language used seems to indicate ambivalence towards the position and power afforded to heterosexual masculinity. After all what can it mean to deconstruct a gender position so closely aligned with the patriarchal centre? Is such a move progressive or regressive? Does it disavow responsibility? These are some of the questions raised when attempting to deconstruct heterosexual masculinity.

1.1 – Masculinities, the monster and the thing: theories of gender

Out of these questions spills a complex matrix of densely interrelated propositions. Of these, two of the most prominent in the field of gender studies relate

3 Lorraine Nencel, “Heterosexuality,” in A Companion to Gender Studies, ed. Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg, and Audrey Kobayashi (Melbourne: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 133-134. 22 to hegemonic masculinity and more recently intersectionality. Within the field of gender studies one of the earliest, and possibly most influential, figures concerned with complicating heterosexual masculinity is Robert Connell, (now known as Raewyn Connell, after transgender surgery). Of particular significance is her use of the term ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Coming from a sociological/Marxist background, Connell’s application of hegemony in relation to masculinity draws upon Antonio Gramsci’s investigation into hegemony and class. For Gramsci hegemony refers to the manner in which a particular class’s opinion and beliefs come to dominate and influence the broader social and cultural apparatus of the state. So long as other groups defer to and agree with the dominant class, the hegemonic status of that class remains intact.

However Gramsci saw hegemony as a fluid proposition in which the power and authority of any given hegemonic discourse is constantly being contested, altered and replaced.

Applying this definition of hegemony to gender, Connell argues that hegemonic masculinity represents that mode of masculinity that is currently idealised or “culturally exalted.”4 The importance of Connell’s definition is that first of all it foregrounds the symbolic condition of masculinity; that is masculinity as an idea is reproduced and performed rather than naturalised and fixed. Secondly, Connell argues that hegemonic masculinity, in representing an ideal type of masculinity, alludes to those modes of masculinity related to factors such as sexuality, race etc., which reside outside of the hegemonic norm. This Othering of masculinity through the existence of various masculinities splinters the monolithic, homogenous model of masculine identity. As Connell writes in relation to Australia, “we can never again speak of ‘Australian Masculinity’; there are multiple masculinities on the continent.”5 Connell’s articulation of hegemonic masculinity remains one of the most powerful concepts utilised in gender studies to critically address both the construction of masculinity as well as the

4 R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (1995; repr., Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005), 77-78. Citations are to the 2005 edition.

5 R.W. Connell, “Australian Masculinities,” in Male Trouble: Looking at Australian Masculinities, ed. Stephen Tomsen and Mike Donaldson (Melbourne: Pluto Press, 2003), 14-15. 23 ambivalent relationship between patriarchy, masculinity and power.

While the notion of hegemonic masculinity is one that has impacted significantly upon the discussion of masculinity in gender studies, its veracity has not gone un- contested. For instance, cultural theorist Toby Miller argues that hegemonic masculinity is a problematic proposition that “explains everything and nothing.” In effect Miller contends that Connell’s articulation of hegemonic masculinity, reads as a circular argument.6 Another point of contention is raised by Demetrakis Z. Demetriou in the journal article, “Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity: A critique.” In this article Demetriou contends that Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity is problematically codified within a narrow range of cultural signifiers associated with an Anglo, Western, rational performance of gendered identity. In this way hegemonic masculinity presents as a monolithic/totalised entity that is conflated around a specific modality of masculinity, one that is fundamentally unmoved and unaffected by non- hegemonic expressions of masculinity. For Demetrious, Connell’s hegemonic model seems to reinscribe the very binary mechanisms of gender that it seeks to critique.7

In a similar vein Michael Moller in the article, “Exploiting Patterns: A Critique of Hegemonic Masculinity”, queries what he sees as a tendency in masculinity studies to, “occlude those techniques and tactics of masculine power that do not quite make sense as dominating or oppressive: to see power as only domination.”8 For Moller, Connell’s negative understanding of hegemonic masculinity oversimplifies the complexity of male identity; in the process delimiting the performance of masculinity to a series of violent, destructive tropes.

The concerns raised by Miller, Demetriou, and Moller point to an ongoing

6 Toby Miller, “Masculinity,” in A Companion to Gender Studies, ed. Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg, and Audrey Kobayashi (Melbourne: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 117-119.

7 Demetrakis Z. Demetriou, “Connell’s Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique,” Theory and Society 39, no. 3 (June, 2001): 347, http://www.jstore.org/stable/657965.

8 Michael Moller, “Exploiting Patterns: A Critique of Hegemonic Masculinity,” Journal of Gender Studies 16, no. 3 (2007): 266, http://dx.doi/org/10.1080/09589230701562970. 24 critical revaluation of the notion of hegemonic masculinity. However these discussions represent not so much a repudiation of the earlier work of Connell but rather a further expansion of the scope and complexity surrounding the development of gender studies. In this regard, the relationship between masculinity and patriarchy is one that gender studies continue to understandably pay close attention to. For gender theorists such as David Buchbinder, patriarchy and masculinity are two distinct bodies that are often mistakenly conflated. This conflation, Buchbinder argues, obscures both the manner in which patriarchy works against men as well as the degree of conformity required from men to satisfy the patriarchal reification of hegemonic masculinity. For Buchbinder the ideological interaction between patriarchy and masculinity is mediated through a social regime of surveillance between and around men. Both hegemonic masculinity and patriarchy are articulated in part through a male gaze that constantly scans for signs of both conformity and non-conformity regarding the appropriate performance of heterosexual masculinity. Masculinity and specifically heterosexual masculinity is thus recognised not only through what it is but also through what it is not.9

Buchbinder’s analysis of the male gaze in relation to the performance of heterosexual masculinity is important in highlighting both the degree and intensity of surveillance men place upon one another in order to maintain the hegemonic model, as well as the negative and restrictive repercussions this process has upon the formation and maintenance of masculine identities. This linkage between heterosexual masculinity and power is a relationship that is often focused upon in gender studies, and one that has arguably greatly benefited our understanding of both the meaning and construction of masculinity. However for some theorists this focus upon masculinity and power is problematic. For instance Lorraine Nencel contends that, while insightful, this mode of investigation leaves “ the power paradigm basically intact, studying men from the

9 David Buchbinder, Performance Anxieties: Re-producing masculinity (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998), 65-66. 25 position of control, whether they have it, want it, or not.”10 Furthermore, Nencel argues that discussions concerning power and masculinity have resulted in a tendency to reductively simplify a range of discursive positions associated with the production of gender, while ignoring the potential empowerment, pleasure and enjoyment produced through gender interaction and performance. Instead, subject interaction is constantly depicted as being negative, disempowering and alienating.

Gender theorist, Chris Beasley, in the article, “Mind The Gap? Masculinity Studies and Contemporary Gender/ Sexuality Thinking”, explores this negative articulation of masculinity through the historical relationship between feminist, sexuality and masculinity studies. While recognising the productive and ongoing interaction between these fields of research, Beasley argues that a widening gap seems to be opening between the postmodern/post-structural orientations within contemporary feminist/sexuality studies and the continued modernist orientation of masculinity studies. Beasley contends that this ongoing modernist alignment reflects the continued dominance of social constructionism (SC) upon the field of masculinity studies. As Beasley writes:

The SC approach has a modernist stress upon power as social structure – as macro, foundational, centred and more or less determining – and is more inclined than postmodern thinking to view power/structures negatively, in terms of oppression. SC writers assert that identities are formed by the social structuring effects of power; however they stress historically/culturally specificsocial variability and complexity of relatively unified subjects rather than emphasising virtually unlimited fluidity per se as postmodern thinkers are inclined to do.11

For Beasley the field of masculinity studies, as influenced by social constructionism, is marked by an ongoing turn towards the unified subject; a negative structuring of power through oppression and an understanding that gender determines sexuality. Importantly, Beasley situates Connell’s theories within the field of Social Constructionism. Thus,

10 Lorraine Nencel, “Heterosexuality,” in A Companion to Gender Studies, ed. Philomena Essed, David Theo Goldberg, and Audrey Kobayashi (Melbourne: Blackwell Publishing, 2005), 137-138

11 Chris Beasley, “Mind The Gap? Masculinity Studies and Contemporary Gender/Sexuality Thinking,” Australian Feminist Studies 28, no. 75 (2013): 115, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2013 .761949. 26 in relation to the broader discussion around hegemonic masculinity Beasley contends that Raewyn Connell’s along with Jeff Hearn and Michael Kimmel’s work presents as a type of second wave essentialist gender discourse not readily compatible with the postmodern destabilisation of power/identity.12

While not explicitly suggesting that these formulations of masculinity are a problem, Beasley’s comparison of these positions to the postmodern deconstruction of gender and sexuality within third wave feminist and sexuality studies seems to be covertly making this point. The underlying supposition behind Beasley’s comparison, is that contemporary Feminist/Sexuality discourses allow for a more nuanced analysis of identity and subject politics, which as of 2013, is still missing from the discussion within masculinities studies. Viewed through the lens of these critical positions, Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity is clearly problematic. Nevertheless this dissertation contends that when applied judiciously, the mechanism of hegemony still affords productive avenues of address in relation to the deconstruction of masculinity. More to the point this dissertation’s post-structural unpacking of Australian heterosexual masculinity aims to facilitate the sort of third wave critique of masculinity that Beasley argues it has yet to undergo.

An important element to this post-structural critique of gender involves the incorporation of an intersectional understanding of masculinity. The term intersectional and its initial usage within the field of gender studies is attributed to Critical Race Theorist, Kimberle Crenshaw. In the article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Colour” Crenshaw utilises the notion of intersectionality to foreground the manner in which Black women in the United States experience multiple forms of discrimination associated with race, class, and poverty that intersect with issues of gender. Crenshaw’s critique of these cultural and economic biases underlined the degree to which Feminist discourses to that

12 Ibid., 116-117. 27 point had tended to paper over the complicating characteristics of race/class.13 The use of intersectional theory in the 1990s then was in part a response to this critical blind spot and in part also the result of its productive compatibility to the post-structuralism of third wave feminism. As a consequence intersectional theory, with its ability to depict/ deconstruct the complex alignment and interaction of multiple aspects of identity and subjectivity, has, according to Kathy Davis, come to be regarded as one of the most significant tools for feminist research today.14

While the development and implementation of intersectional theory continues to reside predominately within feminist discourse around women, in recent years its application has started to extend out into the analysis of other gendered identities and positions. Sociologists Ann-Dorte Christensen and Sune Qvotrup Jensen, in the journal article, “Combining Hegemonic Masculinity and Intersectionality” look to advance a more nuanced understanding of hegemonic masculinity by re-reading Connell’s notion through the lens of intersectionality. For Christensen and Jensen the incorporation of intersectional theory with hegemonic masculinity permits a more fluid understanding of the ambivalent and contradictory relationship that operates between hegemony and masculinity.15 Christensen and Jensen contend that the multiple registers of identity located within intersectional discourses work upon and unsettle, the deterministic monolithic properties of hegemonic masculinity. As Christensen and Jensen write:

13 Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241-1299, http://www.jstore.org/ stable/1229039.

14 Kathy Davis, “Intersectionality as buzzword: A Sociology of Science Perspective on What Makes a Feminist Theory Successful,” Feminist Theory 9, no. 1 (2008): 67-85, http://doi. org/10.1177/1464700108086364.

15 Ann-Dorte Christensen and Sune Qvotrup Jensen, “Combining Hegemonic Masculinity and Intersectionality,” NORMA: International Journal for Masculinity Studies 9, no. 1 (March 2014): 67, http://doi.org/10.1080/18902138.2014.892289.

28 A dialogue with an intersectional approach may be a fruitful way of supplementing and developing the concept of hegemonic masculinity. This approach makes possible multifaceted and process-centred analysis, where different social categories are understood as mutually constitutive. Forms of social differentiations other than gender (class, race/ethnicity, age, sexuality etc.) will thus influence, shape and construct masculinities.16

Utilised in this fashion, the incorporation of intersectional gender analysis with hegemonic masculinity provides a means of deploying Connell’s hegemonic notion as part of a broader post-structural critique of masculinity. In this dissertation an intersectional approach to gender helps to disrupt a unified Modernist reading of convict masculinity by intersecting and interrupting the formulation of gender identity through the modalities of class, criminality, and sexuality.

1.2 – Convict masculinities: a review of the literature

If surveillance, hegemony, and violence are some of the pre-conditions under which contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity is performed, questions arise as to how they might also relate to Australia’s colonial history. In particular; how have these expressions of ideological force shaped the performance and representation of convict masculinity? While the gendered study of heterosexual masculinity has noticeably grown since the 1990s, the same can’t be said for the study of Australian convict masculinity. In this area of research the gendered analysis of convict masculinity occupies a relatively small field of academic work. Nevertheless within this small body of work there are a number of significant texts that address this issue.

One of the most important is the journal article, “Commanding Men: Masculinities and the Convict System”, co-authored by Raymond Evans and Bill Thorpe. In this article Evans and Thorpe focus specifically on the central role convict masculinity played in the reproduction and experience of the penal colony. Drawing upon Connell’s notion of hegemonic masculinity, Evans and Thorpe argue that the violent debasement of convict masculinity was an integral part of the punishment

16 Ibid., 71. 29 associated with transportation and exile.17 For Evans and Thorpe the interaction of these mechanisms of violent punishment, particularly the use of flogging, in conjunction with the rigid patriarchal structuring of convict society engendered an environment that relentlessly sought to humiliate, undermine and emasculate the male convicts.

When the statistical imbalance between the genders is taken into account, (by the end of transportation in 1868, a total of 132,308 male convicts had been sent compared with only 24,690 female convicts)18, a gendered picture emerges of a complex colonial state whose founding moment is not only overrun with questions of masculinity, power and deviancy, but also embraces, as Evans and Thorpe write, a “range of competing masculinities, often in dramatic interaction with each other.”19 Thus while this dissertation looks primarily at the global impact of colonial discourses upon the convict form, it is important to recognise that convict masculinities, as with masculinity in the broader community, are a multifaceted experience made up of a diverse range of different expressions/performances.

Like Evans and Thorpe, David Coad, in the text Gender Trouble Down Under: Australian Masculinities also explores the relationship between convict masculinities and the regime of institutionalised state violence. However, while Coad similarly focuses on the technology and experience of flogging to address the destabilisation of convict identity and masculinity, he also extends his discussion out to incorporate the performance of homosexuality in the colony. As Coad writes, the “convict administration set up a power structure conductive to same-sex practice, blamed the prisoners for what the system itself generated and then spent half a century castigating, and in some cases, executing convicts for ‘unnatural crimes’.”20 For Coad the gender

17 Raymond Evans and Bill Thorpe, “Commanding Men: Masculinities and the Convict System,” The Journal of Australian Studies 22, no. 56 (1998): 23, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443059809387358.

18 Ibid., 18.

19 Ibid., 22.

20 David Coad, Gender Trouble Down Under: Australian Masculinities (Hainaut-Cambresis, France: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2002), 27. 30 imbalance of the early colony in tandem with a sadomasochistic relationship to flogging not only encouraged but also necessitated homosexual activity.

Undoubtedly homosexual activity took place in the early colony, however as Kirsty Reid argues in Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settler and the State in Early Colonial Australia, the extent of this behaviour is complicated by the fact that the documented discussion of homosexuality is primarily located within anti-transportation discourses, which often conflated the perceived evils of sodomy with the process of convict transportation.21 Given the deliberate and sustained foregrounding of sodomy, particularly from the 1830s onwards in critiques of transportation, the precise nature and extent of the actual practice is subsequently difficult to ascertain. It is a practice that Robert Hughes in The Fatal Shore suggests is all the more problematic for the coded and metaphoric language used to describe the extent of homosexuality in the colony.22

However, in this dissertation the question of homosexual activity and its frequency is significant not so much as a representation of what was or wasn’t going on in the penal colony at the time, but rather for how this discussion fed back into pre-existing hegemonic perceptions of convict masculinity as degenerate, deviant, and monstrous. This relationship between criminality, class and the convict form is elaborated upon extensively by Catie Gilchrist in her thesis, Male Convict Sexuality in the Penal Colonies of Australia, 1820-1850. As Gilchrist writes, the “moral anxieties that were generated by the spectre and fear of the taint of the great unwashed were replicated in discourses of crime. Indeed, the metaphors of moral filth and contagion had long figured in criminal rhetoric.”23 For both the bourgeois and the upper class of England there existed a deeply felt fear concerning the apparently deviant relationship

21 Kirsty Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 174.

22 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787-1868 (London: Collins Harvill, 1987; London: The Harvill Press, 1996), 266. Citations refer to the Harvill Press edition.

23 Catie Gilchrist, “Male Convict Sexuality in the Penal Colonies of Australia, 1820-1850” (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2004), 43, http://handle.net/2123/666. 31 between working class masculinity and criminality, and the proximity of these deviant groups to the moral middle class.

Thomas Laqueur suggests in the essay, “Sex and Desire in the Industrial Revolution”, that this conflation of class, masculinity and the monstrous also extended into the realm of sex and desire. In this essay Laqueur writes that the bourgeois and upper classes regarded “the dangerous classes … as preternaturally fecund and productive of monsters.”24 The dangerous classes and the convict subjects, who were an integral part of this group, existed within a matrix of discursive texts that described their, gender, sexuality, and class as monstrous and deviant. One of the concerns of this dissertation is to explore the manner in which the discursive representation of the convict form informed the performance of convict masculinity and impacted upon the wider colonial identity.

Like Coad, Evans, and Thorpe, this dissertation delineates a central and traumatic relationship between convict masculinity and mechanisms of state violence. However the question of state violence and its relationship to the convict body remains a contentious issue in the field of cultural and historical studies. The fractious debates around the issue of violence and the early colony are embedded in a broader series of fault lines, encompassing clashes between modern and postmodern modes of historical analysis; but also between progressive and conservative interpretations of the past. They include the the significance or insignificance given to Australia’s postcolonial condition; the differences between interdisciplinary analysis and traditional empirical analysis of history; and the growing impact of memory and trauma studies upon historiography. In a cultural context these disputes are as much a struggle over who gets to decide what is and is not history or who has that cultural authority/power, as it is about the various discussion about the particularities of content.

24 Thomas Laqueur, “Sex and Desire in the Industrial Revolution,” in The Industrial Revolution and British Society, ed. Patrick O’Brien and Roland Quinault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 118.

32 For historians like Raymond Evans, Bill Thorpe, Henry Reynolds, and David Neal violence was a prominent condition of convict life. However for other historians such as John Hirst, Alan Frost, and Babette Smith the representation of convict experience as violently traumatic is a mythic distortion of the true picture of European Australian History. For instance Babette Smith contends that the empirical facts of colonial history make “a mockery of Robert Hughes’ attempt to declare it Britain’s gulag

… [fundamentally] refuting those who search for a class drama.”25 Similarly, Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold in the essay, “Unshackling the Past” argue that when viewed through the dispassionate lens of economics, convict life and the colony more broadly was productive, healthy, and predominately benign.26 John Hirst, in Convict Society and its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales, argues that the penal colonies in Australia were from their inception free societies. Hirst contends that convict imprisonment was not the same as slavery in the United Sates and as a consequence violence while present was not the central element or experience in convict life.27

In contrast David Neal in the article, “Free Society, Penal Colony, Slave Society, Prison?” counters Hirst’s central proposition, arguing that while different in certain respects from slavery, both “slaves and convicts [were] fixed in contradistinction to freedom; in the one case by the ideology of slavery and in the other the ideology of the criminal law.”28 Both the convicts and the penal colony were fundamentally structured around mechanisms of imprisonment, punishment and forced labour, which, while not exactly the same as slavery in America, shared many of the same ideological, physical and social effects.

25 Babette Smith, Australia’s Birthstain: The Startling Legacy of the Convict Era (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008), 336.

26 Stephen Nicholas and Peter R. Shergold, “Unshackling the Past,” in Convict Workers: Reinterpreting Australia’s Past, ed. Stephen Nicholas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 9-10.

27 John Hirst, Convict Society and its Enemies: A History of Early New South Wales (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983).

28 David Neal, “Free Society, Penal Colony, Slave Society, Prison?” 497-518, Historical Studies 22, no. 89 (1987): 507, http://dx.doi/10.1080/10314618708595765. 33 For constructionist historians like Smith and Hirst, questions of violence are located primarily within empirical frameworks that minimise the importance of ideology, representation, and psychology upon the construction, reception and reproduction of history. However beyond the field of historiography, various discourses including literary theory, post-feminist theory, film theory, and postcolonial theory continue to broaden and complicate the relationship between violence, Australian national identity and colonial history. Developing from the proliferation of post- structural/deconstructive analysis in the late 1970s, this reading of history, language, and culture as text heavily influenced academic research in the humanities during the 1980s and 1990s. In Australia the impact of post-structural critical theory during this period resulted in a diverse range of postcolonial texts. These include The Other Side of the Frontier: An Interpretation of the Aboriginal Response to the Invasion and Settlement of Australia by Henry Reynolds; The Empire Writes Back, by Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin; Ross Gibson’s South of The West: Postcolonialism, and the Narrative Construction of Australia; Paul Carter’s The Lie of the Land; Identifying Australia in Postmodern Times edited by Livio Dobrez; and Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity on a Postcolonial Nation by Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacob.

While certain limitations with regard to post-structuralism’s textualised re- reading of culture began to emerge in the mid 1990s one of the key aspects of these texts in terms of this dissertation relates to their underlying method of transhistorical analysis. Transhistorical approaches look to complicate contemporaneous discourses around issues such as race, gender or class, by re-ordering the relationship between the historical past and the cultural present. In re-contesting the present through discussions of the past, this approach aims to disrupt the artificial separation of the two. Transhistorical analysis enables past events to be re-examined beyond the confines of their historical specificity. This re-configuring of the past and the present along a trans-historical axis thus provides a productive method through which to explore the relationship between convict masculinity and performance of contemporary Australian

34 heterosexual masculinity. This is particularly useful when the construction of personal identity so closely elides into the construction of national identity.

In the context of Australia’s convict history and its interaction with the present, two texts in particular underpin the thematic concerns of this dissertation. The first of these is Graeme Turner’s, National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative. In this work Turner contends that Australia’s cultural/ national identity is built upon a series of ideological narratives located around failure, loss, displacement, and deviancy; and that these narratives of loss relate specifically to the exile, treatment and representation of the convicts. While the reproduction and performance of identity for Turner is constructed rather than innate he argues nevertheless that within this space an important relationship “exists between the condition of white Australia’s beginnings on the one hand and the kind of meanings we now give to our sense of place, our history, and our contemporary version of the self on the other hand.”29 Importantly Turner suggests that the colonial narratives of exile and oppression located around convictism operate as a type of founding cultural map or template that continues to inform how European Australians both understand and misunderstand themselves.30

The second text is Anne Summers’, Damned Whores and God’s Police. In it she examines the patriarchal ideology that has underpinned the reproduction of European Australian female identity since the arrival/invasion of the First Fleet. Summers argues that the particular gendered conditions within the initial penal colony established a cultural template for European women. This template prescriptively codified female sexual identity around the stereotypes of the damned whore or the moral mother. Furthermore, she contends that this cultural heritage continues to impact upon the

29 Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993), 76. Citations refer to the 1993 edition.

30 Ibid., 77. 35 construction of female identity in Australia today.31 The changes that have occurred within the fields of cultural theory and gender studies over the course of the last forty years have led to distinct differences between Summers’ structuralist, Second Wave feminist unpacking of gender, and my dissertation’s spectral interdisciplinary deconstruction of masculinity. However, Summers’ transhistorical connection between Australia’s gendered present and its convict past opens up a productive space that allows for a critical analysis of convict masculinity re-configured within the context of the present. The significance of Summers and Turner’s analyses to this dissertation relates to the manner in which they connect the trauma of Australia’s convict founding moment to the present. For both Summers and Turner this point of historical rupture continues to directly and indirectly impact upon European Australia’s collective imagination.

However the relocation of subject positions traditionally associated with hegemonic authority, such as Anglo heterosexual masculinities, into discourses of marginalisation is undoubtedly a problematic process. All the more when it is also incorporated into a broader discussion involving questions of foundational politics. For cultural historians like Ann Curthoys and Ken Gelder, the appropriation of the post-colonial language of the Diasporic and the marginalised within conservative and progressive discourses points to a potential re-colonisation of the peripheral subject.

As Curthoys argues in the journal article, “Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology,” embedded in the Anglo-Australian understanding of self is a series of mythologies of victimhood. For Curthoys these narratives of failure, defeat, and suffering have been actively and consciously incorporated into both Australia’s national identity and its historical consciousness. As a consequence Curthoys contends, “the emphasis in white Australian popular historical mythology on the settler as victim works against substantial acknowledgment and

31 Anne Summers, Damned Whores and God’s Police, rev. ed. (1975; repr., Melbourne: Penguin Books, 2002), 67. Citations refer to the 2002 edition. 36 understanding of a colonial past, and informs and inflames white racial discourse.”32 In the context of racial relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, Curthoys suggest that any substantial move towards reconciliation will remain blocked while the hegemony of Anglo cultural identity continues to actively embrace the mythology of victimhood.

Similarly Ken Gelder in the article, “When the Imaginary Australia is Not Uncanny: Nation, Psyche and Belonging in Recent Australian Cultural Criticism and History”, argues that an inverted use of postcolonial theory is being deployed by some conservative historians and theorists to displace or counter ongoing questions around the continued marginalisation of Aboriginal people in Australia. As Gelder writes,

“some unsettling conditions of Postcolonialism are enabling a settler Australian relation to country to become paradoxically perhaps more secure than ever before.”33 Gelder’s concern here, is in the potential for post-colonialism to be co-opted into a discursive mechanism that helps to maintain rather than alter or critique Anglo-European hegemonic authority in Australia.

In the context of these important concerns one might well ask, what does it mean to return to the question of masculinity in Australian history? Does such an endeavor contribute to the settlement or unsettlement of heterosexual masculinity? After all haven’t we been here a thousand times before? Men have had their chance; they had their time, their history. Why do we need to have another discussion about men, history, and power? Particularly when there is so much work still to be done around the ongoing marginalisation of other subject identities. Why look at hegemonic heterosexual masculinity?

32 Ann Curthoys, “Expulsion, Exodus and Exile in White Australian Historical Mythology,” Journal of Australian Studies 23, no. 61 (1999): 4, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080.1444305990987469.

33 Ken Gelder, “When the Imaginary Australia is Not Uncanny: Nation, Psyche and Belonging in Recent Australian Cultural Criticism and History,” Journal of Australian Studies 29, no. 86 (2005): 163, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443050509388042 )

37 Perhaps the clearest reason for a continued discussion of heterosexual masculinity is precisely because marginalisation continues to impact so profoundly upon the displaced and the peripheral. In effect, heterosexual masculinity lies where the interaction between representation, history, ideology, power, and identity gets messiest. Any exploration of hegemonic representation that seeks to address the construction of those representations from within that hegemony instead of from without has to contend with the problematics of this sort of critical analysis. However, to only address hegemonic masculinity from afar or from the outside is to universalise the Anglo/ heterosexual male subject within patriarchy, ensuring that masculinity remains the invisible, essential norm. Formulating heterosexual masculinity this way ensures that all gendered positions and identities remain fixed within the negative signification of difference. To find a way out of this process of negative repetition requires another way of exploring difference.

This dissertation argues that the ongoing efficacy of subject politics, gender theory, and feminist theory requires a shared process of critical interrogation working from both outside and inside the centralised monads of ideological signification. To de- centralise the binary codification of authority necessitates a radical re-imagining and exploration of those expressions of identity/power as they reside within these centralised positions. My discussion around heterosexual masculinity and convict masculinity, in both the dissertation and the visual practice, functions as a means to re-contest the problematics and discursive possibilities of heterosexual masculinity today.

In 1998 when Evans and Thorpe published their article, “Commanding men” they stated their surprise at the minimal, indeed almost non-existed analysis of Australia’s colonial/convict history through the lens of masculinity. Given that the initial period of European Australia’s settlement, invasion and exile was, for at least the first forty years, structured around, and predominately populated by men, a large percentage of whom were convicts or ex-convicts, this is indeed a peculiar, almost uncanny circumstance. Yet in the intervening sixteen years the minimal amount of research

38 conducted into convict heterosexual masculinities suggests a state of affairs which if anything has become even more puzzling.

Both the written dissertation and visual practice operate within this gap between research such as Evans and Thorpe’s which unpacks convict masculinity within its specific historical context, and post-structural gender theory that critically addresses contemporary Australian masculinities. By re-configuring and re-animating European Australia’s colonial past within a post-colonial present, this thesis seeks to unpack the manner in which narratives of convict masculinity continue to inform and haunt the reproduction and representation of contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity. In isolating convict masculinity from its historical continuity and incorporating it into the present my research looks to explore the manner in which both Australian national identity and heterosexual masculinity are historical confabulations. The figure of the convict is used then to disrupt the illusion that European Australia’s colonial past is removed from its gendered present.

1.3 – An interdisciplinary moment with Walter Benjamin

Working within an interdisciplinary framework, this dissertation utilises a critical discourse methodology. Discourse in this context relates to the ideological structures and mechanisms reproduced within and around the body. This formulation draws upon Foucault’s understanding of discourse as the expression of the relationships of power and knowledge within a particular constituent field and the manner in which these mechanisms or micro-physics of power “invest human bodies and subjugate them by turning them into objects of knowledge.”34 However, while my use of critical discourse theory touches upon Foucault’s work, its particular application in this dissertation is viewed primarily through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s cultural criticism.

Benjamin’s critical practice provides the conceptual framework that underlies

34 Michel Foucault, Discipline And Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan, 2nd ed. (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1975; New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 28. Citations refer to the Vintage Books edition. 39 my interdisciplinary approach. Interdisciplinary research in this context is understood as the integration and incorporation of different disciplines to address a particular question or issue. As a process of inquiry, interdisciplinary practice operates within the spaces that traditionally sit outside of any one particular discipline. As Allen F. Repko writes in, Interdisciplinary Research: Process And Theory, most “interdisciplinary study examines contested terrain – problems, issues, or questions that are the focus of several disciplines.”35 Viewed within this liminal formulation, interdisciplinary research is particularly useful in addressing the contested politics of post-colonial marginal representation.

Using this interdisciplinary approach, the dissertation addresses contemporary

Australian gender within the intersecting disciplines of trauma theory, literary criticism, gender theory, historiography, psychoanalytic theory and visual cultural theory. Operating within the contested space between these disciplines, my critical discourse methodology utilises comparative textual analysis to unpack the problematics of post-colonial European Australian identity/masculinity. The dissertation structures this comparative textual analysis around the critical interactions and overlap between cinematic, literary and visual/fine art texts. Underpinning this analysis are three Australian films, Van Diemen’s Land (2009), The Boys (1998), and Wolf Creek (2005). Each of these cinematic texts functions as a discursive doorway to open up various thematic questions around gender and national identity. These cinematic discussions however should not be read as film criticism. Rather, each film, along with the literary and fine art texts that intersect them; addresses the mechanisms of mimesis, representation and ideology that lie at the centre of my post-colonial exploration of convict and contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity. These cinematic texts act as a through line; a thematic structure that keeps the discussion moving forward.

The link in this dissertation between these thematic/ontological questions of identity/gender and broader theoretical and epistemological concerns with the

35 Allen F. Repko, Interdisciplinary Research: Process And Theory, (London: Sage Publications, 2008), 6. 40 ideological reproduction of masculinity and history, is facilitated through the work of Walter Benjamin. Writing between the shadows of the First and Second World Wars, Benjamin’s Gothic analysis of representation and European modernity critically addresses universal formulations of politics, culture and history. Much of Benjamin’s work is concerned with providing the marginalised experience and subject with a space to unsettle the hegemonic order. Benjamin’s critical unpacking of universal history embodies one of the key theoretical positions to underscore my postcolonial reading of European Australia’s construction and representation.

The other thematic component concerns Benjamin’s contextualisation of theory as praxis and image. For Benjamin the analysis of culture necessitates thinking in images. The image as representation is the thing. It is the object of focus that reveals most clearly the ideological mechanisms underpinning both the construction as well as the decay of meaning. The fault lines that circulate around modernity’s structuring of origin, decay, mimeses, and repetition emanate out from the fractured exchange between visual culture, language and representation. Benjamin’s method of cultural analysis is realised then around a double process; a process that necessitates a sustained and continued focus upon the material spaces, objects, and experiences of modernity/ capitalism and a turning over and re-turning over of the material performativity of the self. At the same time Benjamin is also re-contesting and re-formulating this cultural material within the aesthetic process of montage.36

Much of Benjamin’s work addresses the manner in which history, capitalism and modernity not only intersect within the subject, but also how they marginalise and displace those at the periphery of social and cultural environments. However, as in The Arcades Project, Benjamin presents the relationship between the subject and ideology as open-ended. It is not only restrictive or alienating but also pleasurable and constructive. Benjamin fashions this more liminal productive exchange around the phantasmagorical

36 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982; Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), 460. Citations are to the Harvard University Press edition. 41 space of memory and dream. His spectral formulation of memory is significant to my dissertation because as an allegorical fragment, as a referent of partial decay, it is able to move between the ‘real’ as language and the ‘real’ as traumatic affect or experience. Mediating between these two spectral experiences, Benjamin simultaneously channels and explodes the narrative fictionality of history.37

The spectre doesn’t so much bridge or link the past to the present as blast apart the illusion of their discrete separation from one another. The spectre thus encompasses one version of Benjamin’s dialectical image. In this way the spectre constitutes not only the fragmentation of a marginalised past but equally embodies the fractured displacement of the present as well. In this sense we the constituency of the present, as the remainder of the past, the remainder of modernity, are already ghosts. Doubly so, for the present is always in denial of its own spectral condition; perhaps it is for this reason amongst others that the past continues to get under our collective skin. It is the ability of the spectral past to irritate the present, to haunt our desire to command the historical now that engenders it with political capital.

1.4 – Haunted histories: when memory and trauma collide

This spectral reading of Benjamin’s work locates his critical analysis within the turn to collective memory and trauma theory that in the 1990s emerged across various tertiary academic disciplines. It was most notable in the humanity disciplines associated with sociology, art history/theory, film theory, postcolonial theory and narrative/ literary studies. Collective trauma as described by sociologist Ron Eyerman, “refers to a dramatic loss of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion.”38 Through this mediation between collective and individual experiences, the turn to memory and trauma in the West has been seen as a means of politically re-engaging the content of post-structural theory

37 Ibid., 466.

38 Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 2. 42 with the practice of personal experience, and in particular the politics of marginalisation.

In the field of contemporary cultural trauma studies, literary theorist Cathy Caruth is regarded (along with Shoshanna Felman, Dominick LaCapra and Geoffrey Hartman) as one of the central figures responsible for the advent of cultural trauma theory in the early 1990s. Cathy Caruth re-formulated aspects of Freud’s analysis of trauma, repetition and language, as a means of addressing the crisis in contemporary historical experience and representation. Caruth’s formulation of trauma incorporates a collective experience of traumatic suffering within a particular type of history that is paradoxical, indeterminate, and repetitive. It is a mode of historical displacement that circulates around both the past and the future. As Caruth writes, “ trauma narratives do not simply represent the violence of collision but also conveys the impact of its very incomprehensibility. What returns to haunt the victim … is not only the reality of the violence but also the reality of the way that its violence has not yet been fully known.”39

In this sense, cultural trauma, while tied to history and the historical, is experienced outside of history in so far as its return is structured around a point of delay. For Caruth the reformulating of trauma narratives within a literary context is a cultural manifestation of this delay, one that opens up a space with which to ethically address questions of history, violence and displacement.

As an ethical project, one of the stated goals of trauma/memory studies has been to find some form of redress for those who have been touched by traumatic violence. To do this, to give the marginalised past a voice necessitates a form of cultural reading and production that might be described as a type of testimonial exchange which is problematically structured around interpretation and empathy. The transposition of traumatic narratives through the intermediacy of the secondary witness (the historian, theorist or artist) generates a knotted interaction between the properties of difference, lack, and absence within the displaced subject. As translator or medium through which the trauma of difference is addressed, the secondary witness is reliant upon empathy.

39 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 6. 43 However empathy can collapse all too easily into a type of fetishised trauma, whereby difference is replaced with lack. Put another way, the subject’s difference and the trauma around that difference become conflated, in the process erasing or glossing over the qualities or characteristics that marked the person/moment out as particular to itself. Thus, the subject is not only re-displaced along the horizon of transhistorical marginalisation but perhaps more disturbingly, is displaced within the text itself. The projected shadow of the secondary witness (the historian, theorist or artist) can in this way end up consuming and through this process, replacing the traumatised subject.

Dominick LaCapra in the essay “Trauma, Absence, Loss,” attempts to counter this re-colonisation of the traumatised subject through a type of unsettled empathy. As LaCapra writes the, “role of empathy and empathic unsettlement in the attentive secondary witness … involves a kind of virtual experience through which one puts oneself in the other’s position while recognising the difference of that position and hence not taking the other’s place.”40 For LaCapra the distance this empathic unsettlement affords between author and subject is the pre-condition for working through questions of trauma. By not conflating or glossing over difference with trauma, a space opens to permit the material and the immaterial, the irreconcilable and the reconcilable to productively haunt the formulation of colonial modernity. The spectre of absence and the mourning of loss are able to operate at different registers that overlap but avoid consuming or disavowing the other.

In this dissertation the analysis of trauma, as located around the spectral fragment of convict masculinity, is fashioned around LaCapra’s understanding of empathetic unsettlement. The process of relating the historical after-effect of this traumatic moment to contemporary Australian masculinity requires its incorporation into collective memory. The possibility of extending this moment of historical trauma beyond its temporal bounds, hinges on the contentious realisation of collective experience. One of the earliest and most significant theorists concerned with collective

40 Dominick LaCapra, “Trauma, Absence, Loss”, Critical Inquiry 25, no.4 (Summer, 1999): 722, http://www.jstore.org/stable/13441000. 44 memory is French philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs. Halbwachs argued that individual memory is structured around a nexus of social groupings, such as family and community, and that these generate a network of shared collective memories/ narratives. Situated within these social groups, our personal, individual memories are negotiated through the pre-existing horizon of collective group memory. As Halbwachs writes:

We can understand each memory as it occurs in individual thought only if we locate each within the thought of the corresponding group. We cannot properly understand their relative strength and the ways in which they combine within individual thought unless we connect the individual to the various groups he is simultaneously a member.41

For Halbwachs, personal identity is structured through the shared exchanging of stories, experiences and memories that mark out the social space of collective memory. While collective memory is mediated through the individual, the historical composition of any given society, and the individuals who comprise that society, are generated and re- configured within the collective cultural imagination. Certainly Halbwachs’ formulation of collective memory has its limitations and at various times throughout the twentieth century the notion of collective memory has been contested, stretched, extended and deconstructed. Nevertheless, in the context of this dissertation, Halbwachs’ work establishes a provisional understanding of collective memory as a type of conceptual ground or network, which allows for the critical unpacking of convict masculinity within a contemporary context.

In this formulation, collective memory functions not only as a mode of social interaction but also as a form of remembrance. It operates on two inter-related registers, involving both the incorporation and codification of the present into various modes of collective knowledge as well as the re-calibration of the past into the present through the collective mechanism of history, memory, and narrative. The process of exchange between these two registers intimately links history, identity, and collective memory

41 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. and ed. Lewis A. Coser (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1952; Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 53. Citations refer to the University of Chicago Press edition. 45 together. As cultural theorist, Frits Gierstberg argues in the essay, “The Big History Quiz”, a shared “historical consciousness creates the potential for collective memory. Historical knowledge remains embedded in our society in part because events and people are actively remembered, through deliberate decision-making about what should and should not be remembered.”42 The process of actively remembering, as Gierstberg puts it, is central to the dynamic interface between history and collective memory.

However, in relation to cultural trauma and collective identity, the traumatic act is marked in part by the disruption to the process of active remembrance. Indeed as sociologist Neil J. Smelser suggests in the essay, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma”, one of the defining features of collective trauma is located around a dual tendency that involves both the “mass forgetting and collective campaigns on the part of groups to downplay or ‘put behind us,’ if not actually deny a cultural trauma on the one hand, and a compulsive reoccupation with the event, on the other hand.”43

Commensurate with this dual process then, is a deeply felt sense of cultural ambivalence concerning the traumatic event. This collective ambivalence, Smelser contends, manifests in a propensity for:

Generation after generation to engage in compulsive examining and re- examining, bringing up new aspects of the trauma, reinterpreting, re-evaluating, and battling over symbolic significance. These are the ingredients of what might variously be called cultural play, cultural fussing, even cultural wars. Ambivalence lends strength to the assertion of indelibility: cultural trauma can never be solved and never go away. Over time the repeated and relived cultural activity yields a reservoir of hundreds of different renditions of the memory – some dead, some latent, some still active, some “hot,” but in all events many that are available for resuscitation.44

Importantly, Smelser argues that the underlying social anxieties and compulsions

42 Frits Gierstberg, “The Big History Quiz,” in Questioning History: Imagining the Past in Contemporary Art, ed. by Frank van der Stok, Frits Gierstberg, and Flip Bool (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers, 2008), 49.

43 Neil J. Smelser, “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, co-authored by Jeffery C. Alexander et al., (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 53.

44 Ibid., 54. 46 associated with collective trauma lead to an effect known as splitting. This splitting materialises culturally around two expressions of the same ambivalence. One form presents as denial and repression while the other is associated with an obsessive sense of dominant certainty.

In the context of European Australian history the effects of collective trauma as described by Smelser clearly resonate around recent cultural debates concerning what has come to be described as the history wars of the 1990s. During the history wars, debates circulated around the degree of violence and responsibility linked to the historical relationship between Indigenous and settler peoples. However, the cultural trauma associated with European settlement/invasion also resonates powerfully within the historical representation of convict identity. The inscription of convict masculinity as monstrous, along with the physical process of transportation and exile, when taken together with the experience of penal incarceration in the colony, have generated a constellation of collective traumas particular to Australia. As a result, the convict body and the deviant masculinity associated with that body, have been simultaneously repressed and reified. In the context of my gendered analysis of Australian heterosexual masculinity, the spectre of convict masculinity functions not only as a metaphor for European Australia’s fractured colonial history but as the ruptured wound, the scar that marks the trauma of a colonial subject whose identification and representation remains historically and culturally unresolved.

1.5 – Thinking in images: approaches to visual research

The discussion into Australian heterosexual masculinity has to this point been situated within the context of the written dissertation. However the thesis as a form of research is equally structured around a visual practice. The following section addresses these thematic and conceptual concerns in relation to the role, function, and methodology of my practice. Divided in two, the first half of this section begins with a discussion of some of the historical issues related to the pedagogic understanding of Fine Art as research. The second half of the section expands upon these concerns, addressing

47 the methodological mechanism utilised in the practice as a mode of visual research.

Fine Art visual practice as a form of higher academic research has existed in Australia for almost thirty years. However the question of visual practice as research remains one of the most perplexing and contentious pedagogic questions in the field of tertiary education. Indeed, as Kristina Niedderer and Linden Reilly note in the editorial essay, “Research Practice in Art and Design: Experimental Knowledge and Organised Inquiry,” the migration of Fine Art practitioners into PhD degrees, has only increased this pedagogic uncertainty. Here at the pointy end of tertiary education, questions of academic rigour, the veracity of research findings, and the demands around new research are central concerns that seem to cut against the grain of visual art.45 To a large degree the continued uncertainty around Fine Art research, and particularly PhD research, relates to the inability of Fine Art practices to fit neatly into the traditional university model of scientific, empirically based research.

One of the significant challenges that visual practice research faces is that this empirical model by and large remains the dominant format or method in relation to university research. The legitimacy of Fine Art research is problematically discussed from within an empirical/deductive model that one might say is structurally ill-equipped to deal with the particularities and differences that are specific to Fine Art practices. When practice-based research is institutionally viewed through the lens of positivism (as it often is), it inevitably seems to struggle to match the rigour and importance of either scientific or social science disciplines. At the core of this debate lies the question of research validity. As Henk Borgdorff, Professor of Art Theory and Research at the Amsterdam School of the Arts argues, the “misgivings about the legitimacy of practice-based research degrees in the creative and performing arts arise mainly because people have trouble taking research seriously which is designed, articulated and

45 Kristina Niedderer and Linden Reilly, “Research Practice in Art and Design: Experimental Knowledge and Organised Inquiry,” Journal of Research Practice 6, no. 2 (2010): 3, http://jrp.icaap.org/ index.php/jrp/article/view/247. 48 documented with both discursive and artistic means.”46 For Borgdorff, this resistance to practice-based research arises in part because of a perceived lack of objectivity around the production, criteria, or assessment of Fine Art research and in part because the established and dominant scientific ‘old guard’ believe their empirical, deductive, and positivist research methods are the norm against which other methods need to be judged.47

Underlying the tension between these two modes of research is a broader European philosophical tradition, which locates the relationship between the subject and object, self and other and the notion of original and copy/lack. In this tradition the physical world and its material attributes are regarded as the original and real subject, which is copied and replicated by the Other of representation. For cultural philosopher Christopher Janaway, this conceptualisation of representation and aesthetics can be traced back to Plato’s philosophical critique of both. In the essay, “Plato”, Janaway writes that,

Plato disparages mimesis in the visual arts by comparing it with holding up a mirror in which the world mechanically reproduces itself. The point of the comparison is arguably that the painter makes no real thing, only an image… To make such an image requires no genuine knowledge: no knowledge of the real things of which one makes an image.48

Representation as a consequence, is regarded as an inferior and partial copy of the self/ subject. As such, European art as visual representation has traditionally been considered a secondary form of conceptual inquiry. In short, science as a discipline describes the real and authentic world while art describes the unauthentic copy/representation of the world. Science is deemed to be the pursuit and production of truth where as art

46 Henk Borgdorff, “The Debate on Research in the Arts” (Lecture, Felix Meritis Centre, Amsterdam, Autumn, 2005): 20, http://www.ips.gu.se/digitalAssets/1322/1322713_the_debate_on_research_in_the_arts.pdf.

47 Ibid.

48 Christopher Janaway, “Plato,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. Berys Gaut and Dominic McIver Lopes (2001; repr., New York: Routledge, reprinted 2003), 5. Citations are to the 2003 edition. 49 is concerned with the semblance/praxis of representation. As Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, and Tere Vaden argue in Artistic Research: Theories, Methods and Practices, the consequences of this philosophical orientation have been to artificially pry apart art and research and accord “fundamentally different modes of thinking” to each.49

One of the goals of contemporary practice as research is to finds new ways and methods of re-integrating art and research. Part of this process has involved the development of terminology that aims to clarify the definition and relationship of practice and research. Two of the most prominent terms used at the moment are practiced-based and practice-led research. Practice in both terms is located around the researcher’s own visual work and relates to the production and/or performance of creative processes and activities. Similarly the two modes of research place a significant emphasis upon the role of personal practice within research. However as Professor Linda Candy argues in Practice Based Research: A Guide, the two forms of research differ in relation to the emphasis, orientation, and presentation of the visual/creative practice within the PhD assessment framework. For Candy, in practice-based research understanding and assessment of the claims made within the written dissertation require a physical engagement and interaction with the visual practice. Conversely in practice-led research, the process of assessment does not require the physical interaction with the visual practice. Rather practice-led research is structured around an extensive documentation of the creative process itself.50

However, while Professor Candy’s definition provides a provisional framework with which to discuss visual/creative practice as research, in the field of higher academic research there is no clear consensus in relation to these or similar terms. As Maarit Makela, Nithikul Nimkulrat, D.P. Dash, and Francois-X. Nsenga point out in the

49 Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta and Tere Vaden, Artistic Research: Theories, Methods and Practices, trans. Gareth Griffiths and Kristina Kolhi (Gothenburg, Sweden: University of Gothenburg, ArtMonitor, 2005), 25.

50 Linda Candy, “Practice Based Research: A Guide” (CCS Report., Creative & Cognitive Studios, Sydney: University of Technology, 2006): 1, http://www.creativeandcognition.com/resouces/PBR%20 Guide-1.1-2006.pdf. 50 article “On Reflecting and Making in Artistic Research”, the terminology, structures and implementation of creative research doctoral degrees vary significantly between institutions and also between countries. However in spite of this variability, Makela, Nimkulrat, Dash, and Nsenga suggest that there is a discernable trend towards the term practice-led.51 In this thesis the equal significance of practice and theory with regards to unpacking of Australian masculinity, orientates both the dissertation and the visual work towards a form of practice-led research.

Just how does the practice do this? The manner in which my visual work functions as a form of research into Australian heterosexual masculinity and its relationship to convict masculine identity, is a question that unfolds around the politics of representation. In Europe, as already noted, visual representation has traditionally been regarded as a mode of simulacra; a repeated or partial copy of the ‘real’ world. As the depleted, repetitive Other, representation is thus formulated around a relationship to the ‘real’ that is codified within the negative signification of difference. As such. the ideological structuring of meaning and knowledge is built upon a negative binary exchange between the ‘real’ and representation, which codifies all forms of difference from the ‘subject’ as the mimetic un-original expression of the ‘real’. Difference, repetition, and representation become conflated together with the negative signification of the ‘other’ as lack or copy. However, this is not the only possible way to understand representation, with Walter Benjamin’s cultural analysis offering another perspective of this idea.

Benjamin contends that the problem is not with representation, but rather the philosophical miss/understanding of the ‘real’ as origin. For Benjamin, the notion of origin as the authentic demarcated point of a singular unique becoming, is an illusion. There are no points of singular origin, only origins of repetition; so ‘becoming’ in effect

51 Maarit Makela et al., “On Reflecting and Making in Artistic Research,” Journal of Research Practice 7, no. 1 (2011): 3-4, http://jrp.icaap.org/index.php/jrp/article/view/280/241.

51 is repetition. As Benjamin writes in The Origin of German Tragic Drama:

The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis … Origin is not, therefore, discovered by the examination of actual findings, but it is related to their history and their subsequent development. The principles of philosophical contemplation are recorded in the dialectic which is inherent in origin. This dialectic shows singularity and repetition to be conditioned by one another in all essentials.52

Benjamin’s separation of origin from genesis not only disrupts the accommodation of origin with the ‘subject’ as an authenticity singularity but also inverts this notion, suggesting instead that origin-as-becoming is repetition. This double process is important to this discussion because, in peeling origin away from genesis, Benjamin emancipates representation from the cul-de-sac of mimetic shadow play. Representation then as a mode of inquiry is not necessarily structured around the notion of ideological lack or difference as un-authentic. Instead representation, as the realisation of repetition, encompasses the productive becoming that is difference. Repetition, difference and representation are enmeshed within the authentic and productive masquerade of role- play and performance, which in turn circulates within and through the ideological materialisation of the subject.

Representation as the physical manifestation of our ideological selves, resides not at the edge or the periphery of social and philosophical inquiry but at its very centre. Much of Benjamin’s later work is preoccupied with the clash between these two fundamentally different understandings of repetition and representation. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin locates this clash at the epicentre of European modernity, while in the essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History” he applies it to the universal/epic conceptualisation of history. In both texts, representation is a methodological approach that Benjamin describes as the dialectical image; an approach which he likens to the aesthetics of montage. As Benjamin writes in The Arcades Project, the method “of

52 Walter Benjamin, The Origin Of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963; London: Verso, 2009), 45-46. Citations are to the Verso edition. 52 this project: literary montage. I needn’t say anything. Merely show. I shall purloin no valuables, appropriate no ingenious formulations. But the rags, the refuse – these I will not inventory but allow, in the only way possible, to come into their own: by making use of them.”53 Benjamin’s understanding of representation is located around an imagistic materialisation of identity, space, and memory that is utilised to re-configure and re- contextualise the marginalised subject, including that of art/representation itself. In the process, representation as the material actualisation of repetition and difference speaks directly to the lived trauma/disturbance that is European modernity.

Benjamin’s productive account of repetition and representation establishes an optical ethics that critically utilises representation to directly address the ideological mechanisms embedded within knowledge-based systems. This mode of representation is one that cultural, and literary theorist, Patrick Fuery elaborates upon in the essay “Representation, Discourse and Desire–Contemporary Australian Culture and Critical Theory.” In this essay, Fuery contends that cultural theory has extended the notion of representation beyond the mechanics of mimetic reproduction and into the realm of ideological construction. As Fuery writes, “to represent and to be represented is to signify and, perhaps even more critically vital, is to construct ways of meaning.”54 For Fuery then, as with Benjamin, representation is a mode of meaning that is intimately tied to, and constructed through, the subject. This expanded understanding of the aesthetics of representation is one that Professor Jill Bennett refers to as ‘practical aesthetics’. Bennett’s notion of practical aesthetics, like Benjamin’s fractured aesthetics, operates within an interdisciplinary space that situates art within an extended visual- cultural field55.

53 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 460.

54 Patrick Fuery, “Introduction: Representation, Discourse and Desire–Contemporary Australian Culture and Critical Theory,” in Representation, Discourse and Desire–Contemporary Australian Culture and Critical Theory, ed. Patrick Fuery (King Gardens, Melbourne: Longman Cheshire Pty Ltd, 1994), 5.

55 Jill Bennett, Practical Aesthetics: Events, Affects and Art after 9/11 (London: I.B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2012), 90. 53 For practice-structured research specifically concerned with the ethics of representation, Benjamin offers a model of research that critically integrates the performative materiality of representation into the discursive politics of signification. To the question that asks, “What does practice-led research do that other forms of research can’t do?” a provisional answer might begin by linking practice-led research to the politics of representation. When situated within a positive understanding of repetition, practice-led research is able to actualise and speak to the ideological fault-lines embedded within the material objects that mark out the everyday experiences of power.

For political and social philosopher, Wendy Brown, the political/cultural significance of this task is directly linked to the limitations of empirical research within discourses of history and representation. Utilising a Benjaminian approach, Brown argues in Politics Out of History, that:

The questions about history that matter for the political present are not answered by a factually precise account of the North American slave trade in the nineteenth century, or by a listing of the homosexuals, gypsies, Jews and communists killed by European fascists in the 1930s and 1940s. Rather, the political questions produced by the current crisis in historiography and by the breakdown of a progressive historical metanarrative include these: How do the histories of slavery, colonialism, or Nazism in North America and Europe contour contemporary political, social, and cultural life? How do these histories constrain, produce, or occupy the present? No empirical or materialist history can answer these questions, yet that very failing appears to be what such histories are warring against both in their claims to truth and in their reproaches of those histories that call into question the possibility of an empirically ‘true’ account. The complex political problem of the relation between the past and present, and both to the future, is resolved by neither facts nor truth.56

Given that Benjamin saw history and representation as two sides of the same coin, the disciplinary tensions and political urgency located by Wendy Brown around history are equally situated around questions of representation. Indeed if, in the above passage, the word representation is inserted over that of history, we have a description of the problematic academic environment that practice-led research finds itself in. However, at the same time it is precisely because this problematic instability is so closely

56 Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001), 141.

54 aligned with questions of representation that visual culture is such a powerful method for considering the discursive relationships between the marginalised subject and institutions of power. Visual research is able to foreground the traumatic and productive flows of power and ideology that intersect through the reproduction of identity via the materiality of the practice itself.

1.6 – Material matters: affect and representation

In a number of ways my practice as research draws on Benjamin’s optical ethics to address the question of Australian contemporary heterosexual masculinity and its relationship to convict male identity. One of the central concerns underpinning these various methodological approaches is the question of trauma. While the practice primarily addresses the question of trauma in relation to heterosexual masculinity; circulating through and around this analysis are an array of intersecting ideological traumas associated with history, nation, and space. The complex relationship between art, trauma and experience is one that Professor Jill Bennett directly addresses in Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art. In Empathic Vision, Bennett begins by asking how can contemporary art engage politically with questions of trauma without, on the one hand presenting itself in the impossible form of testimonial realism, or, on the other hand coming across as a disinterested aesthetic exercise.

For Bennett the key to art successfully engaging with the politics of trauma turns upon the question of empathy and its relationship to affect. Bennett contends that trauma-related art is not about conveying a direct analogic representation of a traumatic act, event, or experience. Nor is it about trying to invoke a sense of “crude empathy” through overidentification. Rather, trauma-related art draws upon the affective registers embedded within the materiality, processes, and mechanism of a particular practice to explore and provoke a traumatic moment of critical awareness.57 As Bennett writes,

This conjunction of affect and critical awareness may be understood to constitute the basis of an empathy grounded not in affinity feeling( for another insofar

57 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 5-10. 55 as we can imagine being that other) but on a feeling for another that entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible.58

For Bennett the critical engagement and awareness generated through trauma-related art is subsequently mediated through a process of oscillation between the seen and the unseen, the known and the unknown. The contingent uncertainty of art thus opens up a form of temporal/spatial disturbance, which could be described as traumatic shock. In doing so Bennett argues that “visual art presents trauma as a political rather than a subjective phenomenon. It does not offer us a privileged view of the inner space; rather, by giving trauma extension in space or lived place, it invites an awareness of different modes of inhabitation.”59 Visual art, like the spectre, manifests as a form of cultural unsettling. It is a process of mediated working through, which like a scar marks the site of trauma.

Bennett’s notion of considered affect and its relation to empathy underscore the manner in which my visual research looks to engage with the trauma of convict masculinity and its impact upon contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity from a critical distance. My work does not attempt to replicate or directly reproduce an image of this traumatic experience; instead the practice/research looks to address the ideological mechanisms located around the traumatic formation and/or expression of gendered identity. Utilising a Benjaminian understanding of the material performativity of identity and representation, the methodology of the practice is structured around collage, repetition and materiality. The traumatic inflection of shock Bennett locates around the temporal and spatial sensation of trauma-based art, shares something of Benjamin’s notion of the dialectical image. For Bennett, as with Benjamin, the affective materiality of art disturbs the universal structuring of meaning by tearing at the mythology of homogenous ideological monism.

The dialectical trauma-based image disturbs precisely because in disrupting

58 Ibid., 10.

59 Ibid., 12. 56 the linear understanding of space and time it navigates between the interiority and exteriority of the subject. During this process it refuses the artificial demarcations of meaning/non-meaning and interior/exterior. Bennett locates this movement within the Deleuzian context of sense memory, which unlike the acting-out of “ordinary memory” as descriptive representation, instead actualises the material properties of sensation, memory, and experience.60 While the Deleuzian notion of sensation is critical of representation, in the context of this dissertation Benjamin’s performative understanding of representation shares many of the same qualities as Deleuze’s sensation.

Representation then is not descriptive but performative. It is a way of not only thinking through meaning, but of seeing and experiencing meaning through images.

Representation thus becomes both material and immaterial and is the interface between affect and content. Representation intersects through the ideological fragments of identity that materialise within memory, space and history. For Benjamin, representation has the potential to either open up or close down meaning. It is for this reason, amongst others, that art is of such significance for Benjamin.

In looking to activate this sense of traumatic dissonance, the processes of montage, repetition, and materiality are used to foreground and unsettle the constructed ideological mechanisms embedded within the reproduction of Australian heterosexual masculinity. These visual processes aim to cut across and disturb the homogenous reification of identity and history through what might be described as a practice of ‘stuttering’, understood as a spasmodic repetitive blockage. Each process is deployed in a manner that deliberately materialises as a type of visual disruption. This visual stuttering materially opens up a form of cultural trauma located around the potential collapse of narrative meaning. In the context of the work the visual practice of stuttering is located within a matrix of repetitions that intersect through the materials, images, processes and marks that make up the visual research. To this point the broader cultural mechanisms associated with the ideological trauma of Australian heterosexual

60 Ibid., 44-45. 57 masculinity have been formulated around the metaphoric form of spectre. However in a corporal sense the stuttered representation of masculinity is mediated around not only the spectre but also more broadly speaking around Gothic literature’s articulation of the monstrous. The grotesque deviancy that discursively marks convict masculinity, is aesthetically located within the troupe of ghosts, ghouls, zombies, and vampires that materially occupy my visual practice.

The incorporation of the Gothic and Gothic literature into the thesis functions not only as a link between the dissertation and the practice, but also animates the cultural undercurrents that frame European Australia’s historical misunderstanding of itself, its place in the Australian landscape, and the construction of contemporary masculinity. To be clear, the re-imagining of the convicts as Gothic monster and spectre is not to be read as a realistic or direct depiction of the trauma of convict identity. Instead it is around the visual stuttering of the material itself and the repetition of the images that the displaced trauma of Australia masculinity resides. However, the importance of the stutter to my analysis of trauma, identity, and masculinity resonates not only within the politics of cultural representation, but as a person who stutters, it also resonates within the politics of my personal representation.

In the interface between the political and the personal, the mechanism of stuttering stitches together the ideological scraps of Australian representation. In this process the fragments that mark out convict masculinity, Australian national identity, contemporary masculinity and my own personal experiences are repeatedly examined within the material space of the visual practice. In this ideological context, to stutter could be described both culturally and personally, as an act that ‘monsters’ language. It is a process that marks the stutterer as ‘a monster’ themsleves. Stuttering disturbs not only because it suggests a lack of control over body and mind, but also because of what it lets in. What stuttering does is permissively and chaotically scramble language. Through repetition, disruption and blockage, stuttering presents as a type of deviant agent that distorts and re-mixes the syntax, sounds and meanings of language. Like a

58 chemical add-mixture, it dissolves meaning, creating hybrid nonsense languages.

In relation to the visual research, this deviant hybridity of repetition, distortion and re-assemblage is paralleled by the mixed media content of the practice, which incorporates an array of different media from painting, to photography, printmaking, sculpture, drawing and appliqué; but perhaps more importantly is also paralleled by the intermediality of much of the work. While the meaning of the term intermediality varies markedly across disciplines and discourses, Chiel Kattenbelt, Associate Professor of media comparison and intermediality at Utrecht University, suggests that:

Intermediality, unlike transmediality, assumes not so much a change from one medium to another medium but rather a co-relation in the actual sense of the word, that is to say a mutual affect … Intermediality is an operative aspect of different media, which is more closely connected to the idea of diversity, discrepancy and “hypermediacy” …than to the idea of unity, harmony and transparency. Intermediacy assumes an in-between space – ‘an inter’ – from which or within which the mutual affects take place.61

Kattenbelt links this description of intermediality with aesthetic practices/processes of montage, fragmentation and repetition, which act to disrupt the “illusion of continuity.”62 The intermediality of my work may be found within its fragmentation and juxtaposition of materials, and it is precisely this clash of the different modes of signification that looks to disrupt the universal linear narrative of European masculinity in Australia. The Gothic repetition of the practice can be read as a cultural manifestation of the traumatic displaced stuttering of convict masculinity, which in that stuttered form is emptied of meaning and at the same time overdetermined with meaning. This oscillation between lack and excess conveys something of the uncertainty and misapprehension that European Australia feels towards itself and its convict past. Yet, while this stuttered incoherence haunts the European Australian imagination, it also contains within this same repetition the possibility for as yet unrealised new expressions

61 Chiel Kattenbelt, “Intermediality: A Redefinition of Media and a Resensibilization of Perception” (Keynote Lecture at the Intermediality: Performance and Pedagogy Conference, Sheffield University, March 2007): 6. http://78.158.56.101/archive/palatine/events/viewreport/515/.

62 Ibid., 7. 59 of masculinity.

1.7 – Image and text: structuring the dissertation

In this thesis the discussion around the visual practice is structured in two ways. In Chapters Two, Three and Four the practice is located within an interdisciplinary comparative analysis of masculinity that incorporates film, literature, history, and visual art. In these chapters the visual practice, while present in the discussion, is not the central focus. Located within a Benjaminian reading of culture and history, the visual practice along with the other texts helps to facilitate a broader interrogation of ideology, gender and national identity. The practice in each of these three chapters is mediated around a key thematic concern that is specifically unpacked in relation to one of the films, The Boys, Van Diemen’s Land, or Wolf Creek and two visual artists. In Chapter Two the colonial context of the film Van Diemen’s Land is used to address Europe’s Gothic representation of both convict masculinity and the Australian environment. Chapter Three draws upon the film The Boys, to explore the performance of Australian heterosexual masculinity within the economically marginalised space of Sydney’s outer suburban fringe. Chapter Four utilises the film Wolf Creek to explore the gothic tensions and anxieties that circulate violently around the interaction between European masculinity and the Australian environment and in particular the desert environment. Because of the structural importance accorded to each of these films, DVD copies of Van Diemen’s Land, The Boys and Wolf Creek have been included in the thesis. While viewing these films helps to underscore the thematic concerns discussed in the dissertation, it is not a prerequisite for understanding of these issues.

In contrast to Chapters Two, Three and Four of the dissertation, Chapter Five focuses specifically upon the visual practice. The issues of ideology, gender and history in the fifth chapter are consequently folded back into the practice itself. Situated within the methodological space of the stutter, Chapter Five discuses these broader ideological concerns through the aesthetic/visual mechanism of materiality, repetition and montage. Certainly many of the aesthetic and visual themes touched upon in the first four chapters

60 return in the last chapter. However, the focus on the practice in Chapter Five allows for an expanded discussion into the aesthetic approaches used in my work to explore questions of representation, identity and masculinity.

At this juncture the conceptual and theoretical discussions underpinning the visual practice shift in emphasis to incorporate the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari along side that of Walter Benjamin. The introduction of Deleuze and Guattari into the text at this point functions as a means of broadening out and expanding upon some of Benjamin’s thematic concerns. It is not my contention to suggest that their work is directly interchangeable; clearly there are specific differences between Benjamin and Deleuze/Guattari. Nevertheless there are also notable points of shared interest and overlapping conceptual preoccupations which open up the potential for a productive dialogue between them. Drawing upon these intersecting points of commonality and difference, the final chapter addresses the material inflections of signification, representation, ideology, and masculinity that operate within and across the visual practice.

In conclusion, the thesis will attempt to demonstrate the manner in which the Gothic representation of convict masculinity as monstrous and deviant worked to generate a founding moment of collective trauma that continues to haunt the performance and reproduction of contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity. In both the dissertation and the visual practice this traumatic cultural dissonance is located within a non-linear framework which foregrounds the mechanisms of repetition, representation and gender. Located within an interdisciplinary approach that incorporates film, literature, Fine Art and history, this dissertation uses a deconstructive, comparative analysis methodology to explore the intersectional relationship between ideology, masculinity and place. Drawing upon Gothic literature, Walter Benjamin, and in the practice chapter Deleuze and Guattari, the dissertation addresses the negative as well as the productive qualities located within the fragmented marginal representation of Australian European identity and heterosexual masculinity.

61 The cultural displacement and ongoing denial of this fragmented experience speaks to a cultural trauma that continues to haunt the collective European Australian imagination. However in this research, the Gothic monsters that inhabit both the written dissertation and the visual practice speak to an array of heterogeneous possibilities located within the very monstrous hybridity that marks out convict masculinity. The convict form as re-animated within contemporary Australian masculinity occupies a spectral constellation made up of multiple becomings. While many of these becomings lead back to a homogenous reification of hegemonic masculine identity, others offer the monstrous potential for new as yet unrealised forms of masculinity.

62 CHAPTER TWO:

Tales of the Unexpected: When Convicts Colonise the Future

63 This chapter explores the possible relationship between Australia’s convict history and contemporary heterosexual masculinity. Its primary focus is on the political and ontological preoccupations that circulate around the historical representation of the convict form and, in particular, convict masculinity. Viewed through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image and materialist historiography, the figure of the convict is situated within an array of intersecting discourses related to Gothic fiction, cannibalism, history, Modernity and geography. Divided loosely into four sections, the chapter begins with a discussion of the filmVan Diemen’s Land, which acts as an entry point for my other thematic concerns. The second section addresses Europe’s construction of Australia as an imagined space prior to the establishment of a penal colony, and the overlap/interaction between the rise of Gothic literature and that of European Australia. Following on from this, the third section investigates some of the historical debates and positions that have been taken up in relation to Australia’s convict history, and the fourth section explores the relationship between Australia’s convict heritage, our national identity and contemporary masculinity. Interspersed throughout the chapter is a discussion both of my own practice as well as the work of Australian artists Sally Smart and Adam Cullen.

The film, Van Diemen’s Land (2009) is loosely based on the historical figure of Alexander Pearce. In 1823, Pearce with a group of fellow convicts escaped from

Macquarie Harbour into the Tasmanian wilderness.1 Cut off from the mainland by Bass Strait, the island state of Tasmania functioned as a designated ‘prison within a prison’ for the convicts who had continued to re-offend after their arrival in the colony. Known then as Van Diemen’s Land, the island was feared for both its isolation and harsh weather, so when Alexander Pearce and the other convicts fled into the bush they had little understanding of the environment they found themselves in. Unable to obtain food from the wilderness around them they began to cannibalise each other, until only Pearce was left. On his recapture Pearce recounted his story, however the authorities believed

1 Van Diemen’s Land: Hunger is A Strange Silence, directed by Jonathan auf der Heide (Australia: Noise & Light, Inspiration Studios and Screen Australia, 2009), DVD. 64 it to be a fabrication designed to protect the location of the other convicts. Pearce soon escaped again with another convict and when he was recaptured the remains of his companion were once again found in Pearce’s possession. The unavoidable conclusions were drawn and the brutal truth of Pearce’s initial confession was finally acknowledged. In the film however, only the first escape is depicted.

In The Fatal Shore, Robert Hughes describes the vast distance between Sydney Cove and London at the time of the First Fleet as well as the strange unfamiliar quality of the Australian environment for the convicts who were transported there2. This sense of disorientation and disturbance associated with the unfamiliar is powerfully depicted at the beginning of Van Diemen’s Land by an aerial shot that pans across a section of

Tasmanian wilderness. Vast, grey, cold and wet, the immense power of the bush is palpable. Its disturbing strangeness is further emphasised by the discordant background music underscoring the opening sequence of the film.

Like Peter Weir’s 1975 film, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Van Diemen’s Land evokes a sense of Gothic foreboding almost from its first frame. Both films convey a dislocated colonial interaction with the Australian environment. However, unlike Picnic at Hanging Rock in which the forces of nature are depicted as malevolently prescient, the Gothic violence depicted in Van Diemen’s Land is instead located both within the men themselves and through the indifference of the forest towards these foreign bodies. Consequently while the wilderness in Van Diemen’s Land doesn’t present itself as supernaturally embodied, its vast silence and disconnection from the convicts is terrifying in its own way. Alexander Pearce and the other convicts traverse this alien landscape like ghosts, lost to themselves both literally and emotionally, in a journey that follows a similar trajectory to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. In both texts the narrative journey into a foreign and unknown landscape is used metaphorically to depict a psychological journey and descent into the emotionally bleak and destructive

2 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: A History of the Transportation of Convicts to Australia, 1787- 1868 (London: Collins Harvill, 1987; London: The Harvill Press, 1996), 1-2. Citations refer to the Harvill Press edition. 65 possibilities embedded within the human character. In both the novel Heart of Darkness, and the film Van Diemen’s Land, the monsters inhabiting these worlds emerge from within the characters themselves.

The sense of being lost and disconnected is emphasised in Van Diemen’s Land in part through the scale of the wilderness, but also through the interaction between the convicts and their environment. The characters are constantly on the move throughout the film, only stopping to rest at night, which gives a restless transient quality to their relationship with the surrounding bush. Seen passing through it they clearly do not belong to, nor fit in with, the Tasmanian wilderness. This is not their world; it harbours no signs of humanity or technology that they can recognise. Reflecting back nothing of themselves to them, the forest denies their presence. This is the Other dissolved, providing glimpses of a world void of the European Self. This process of seeing, or more precisely, not seeing, is another way in which the film depicts the disruption between the convicts and the environment. As Pearce and the other convicts traverse the environment it becomes clear that, unable to see themselves in the landscape, their gaze pathologically falls back upon themselves as a means of affirming their existence. The convicts in Van Diemen’s Land gaze through the trees and the bush, looking for an escape, for freedom, for a way forward, but the dense forest deflects their gaze and they end up only seeing themselves. In the context of the film this fixation with each other propels their recourse to cannibalism, with each convict resolutely eyeing the others in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to avoid becoming the next victim.

2.1 - Cannibal conversations

While the concept of cannibalism resides within a raft of discourse from anthropology, historicism, economics, politics and literary studies, to name just a few; in the context of the film Van Diemen’s Land and in my exploration of masculine identity, the use of the term is primary concerned within its ideological/post-colonial possibilities. Read this way cannibalism functions as an allegorical mechanism through which to address questions of representation, Otherness and power. In a post-colonial

66 sense cannibalism is thus located along an historical axis between Western Europe as the colonial/Imperial centre and the colonised geographic periphery. Navigating along this axis both cannibalism and the cannibal, from a European perspective are situated within an erotic/transgressive space that both attracts and horrifies.

As the cultural and literary theorist Carlos Jauregui writes in a review of Cannibalism and the Colonial World, cannibalism “constitutes a way to make sense of others and ourselves as well, a trope that involves the fear of the dissolution of identity and conversely, a model of incorporation of difference.”3 Framed this way, one of the most productive aspects to a textual reading of cannibalism concerns the manner in which the act dissolves both into and out of the Subject. This liminal formulation of cannibalism thus locates the cannibal, along with other marginalised figures such as the convict, the barbarous/exotic native, and the insane, within the peripheral formulation of transgressive excess. It is here, at the point where European discourses bend and buckle under the weight of their own contradictions, that the ideological impulses underpinning such discourses reveal themselves most clearly.4

The historical formulation of the Cannibal then, like the displaced convict and the colonial subject, is a discursive figment of Modernity’s imagination. The discourses of transgressive excess located around cannibalism can be seen as part of a broader incorporation/sublimation of the grotesque into the classical body. However, the incorporation of the two does not represent a diminished importance of the grotesque upon the European mind, rather as Peter Stallybrass and Allon White argue in The

3 Carlos Jauregui, “Review of Cannibalism and the Colonial World”, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversen, Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies, 4, no. 1 (2000): 323, http:// www.jstore.org/stable/20641540

4 This productive cultural appropriation of the cannibal figure is particularly evident in the work of Brazilian modernist poet Oswald de Andrade. De Andrade’s use of the cannibal is best known in relation to the 1928 text Manifesto Antropofago. In this text De Andrade takes Europe’s grotesque stereotypes of the cannibal and inverts them. In this carnivalesque reversal De Andrade celebrates the figure of the cannibal as a hybrid entity who is able to consume difference while not being consumed by difference. As a mode of cultural resistance, De Andrade’s poetic formulation of cannibalism is particularly useful within clearly demarcated post-colonial spaces such as Brazil. However in Australia the convict post- colonial experience is complicated both by its absorption into the settler framework of colonial Australia and the displaced signification of identity associated with the process of exile from Great Britain. 67 Politics and Poetics of Transgression:

The Production and reproduction of a body of classical writing required a labour of suppression, a perpetual work of exclusion upon the grotesque body and it was that supplementary yet unavoidable labour which trouble the identity of the classical. It brought the grotesque back into the classical, not so much as a return of the repressed as a vast labour of exclusion requiring and generating its own equivocal energies. Quae negata, grata – what is denied is desired: Augustan satire was the generic form which enabled writers to express and negate the grotesque simultaneously. It was the natural site for this labour of projection and repulsion upon which the construction of the public sphere depended.5

For both Stallybrass and White the grotesque in all its liminal forms including the cannibal is thus not marginal to the development of the Enlightenment/European Modernity but an essential mechanism in the formation and continuance of both. This continued reciprocity between the grotesque body and the classical body however is not only situated within the signifying power of the text but also the ideological representation of identity. In this way as Stallybrass and White argue the corporal permeability of the grotesque/abject body foregrounds the manner in which ideology operates around or upon the Subject and at the same time is also activated through and by the Subjects themselves.

While Stallybrass and White’s formulation of the classical and the grotesque body attempts to disrupt the binary relationship between the two, the political possibilities associated with this disruption remain located primarily within a semiotic space. In this ideological context the process of cannibalism as depicted in the film Van Diemen’s Land can be read not only as a means of sustaining life but also of identity. In effect by agreeing, however reluctantly, to the necessity of cannibalism, the survival of the group is raised above that of the individual. Thus, each murdered individual in a macabre sense in fact remains alive, absorbed and ingested into the body politic of those who are still living. As professor Maggie Kilgour writes in the essay, “The function of cannibalism at the present time”, cannibalism “can become an image for an intense and ambivalent hunger for the liberation from a discrete individual

5 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, 4th ed. (New York: Cornell University Press, 1993), 105-106. 68 identity through reabsorption into a greater corporate identity.”6 Understood this way, European discourses of cannibalism unfold psychologically against a fractured mimetic background, in which the representation of the self collapses into the symbolic. Thus underscoring Europe’s fascination with the cannibal and cannibalism is a desire to turn away from the fractured body of Modernity and return to a mythic form of agrarian monism. In effect it is not the external figure of the cannibal that most disturbs the European imagination but rather its own sense of being cannibalised/consumed by the changing economic and political conditions associated with European industrialisation.

However beyond Stallybrass and White’s textual configuration of the grotesque- classical body resides the corporal form of the convicts’ themselves. For these convicts, the flow of colonial power between centre and periphery, between cannibal convict and the bourgeois Subject is decidedly more fixed and more violent. As literary theorist Peter Hulme argues in the introduction to Cannibalism and the Colonial World “the imagery of cannibalism stems in part from a denial of the very violence underlying colonising (and other similar) relationships, a violence which is then projected onto its victim.”7 Thus while the cannibalism depicted in the film Van Diemen’s Land represents a particular solution to the convicts’ lack of food, the ideological implication of this act - like the physical choice itself - is forced upon them. Indeed the convicts were already lost to themselves; already cannibalised long before they arrived in Macquarie Harbour. As Jon Stratton writes in “Dying to Come to Australia: Asylum Seekers, Tourism and

Death”, transportation “was a sentence shadowed by the earlier sentence of death.”8 Afforded no right of reply, the convict body presents as a type of legal/semiotic zombie, a figure whose humanity and masculinity have been voided. For all the convicts sent to

6 Maggie Kilgour, “The Function of Cannibalism at the Present Time,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 246.

7 Peter Hulme, “Introduction: The Cannibal Scene,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 34.

8 Jon Stratton, “Dying to Come to Australia: Asylum Seekers, Tourism and Death,” in Imagined Australia: Reflections Around the Reciprocal Construction of Identity Between Australia and Europe, ed. Renata Summo-O’Connell (Bern: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers, 2009), 60. 69 Australia, the act of transportation signifies a monumental moment of rupture, when the sovereign body of England consumed and then excreted the foul, polluted convict form, releasing it out and across to the other side of the world.

This process of semiotic and physical death is then amplified further through a disjunction of the Australian landscape and the convicts. Cut off from the world they knew, the convicts like aliens in an alien environment, find themselves drifting in an ideological landscape that is immense, monstrous, and unfamiliar. This dissonance between the escaped convicts and the landscape, subsequently marks out not only their personal situation but also speaks more broadly to the entire colony’s relationship with the Australian environment and, importantly, to the dislocated reproduction of gender/masculinity. As a result of this gendered dislocation the convict’s performance of heterosexual masculinity is driven to cannibalism in an attempt to acquire the hegemonic authority that it lacks. In this regard, the grotesque signification of the exiled convicts permits little in the way of agency. The figure of the convict, and in particular convict masculinity, encompasses not only the mechanisms of cannibalism but also the semiotic waste and remainder left behind; flushed as it were, down under. The digested faecal remains of convict representation speak not only to the decomposition of convict identity, but also to a form of un-remembrance, a desire to forget/erase the convict body itself.

2.2 - Stop motion or blasting with Benjamin

In order to critique this process of un-remembrance, and reclaim the material fragments of convict identity, I will now draw upon the work of Walter Benjamin and in particular his discussion of materialist historiography and the dialectical image.

Ranging across a diverse array of topics and issues, Benjamin utilised a fragmentary, imagistic approach to address the relationship between representation, Modernity and identity. Benjamin’s mosaic interests and methodology preclude the imposition of a singular, over-arching description of his work. Nevertheless underscoring much of his analysis is a recurring, almost obsessive, desire to talk to and 70 retrieve the marginalised form. For Benjamin, the marginalised form whether as object, experience or the Subject, speaks not only to the phantasmagorical effects of Modernity but also importantly to what he describes as the catastrophe of history. Questions of history, as method, function and performance, find their way into many of Benjamin’s discussions.

In one of his most significant essays “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, written just prior to his suicide in 1940; Benjamin directly unpacks the essentialist/ naturalist formulation of history and critiques the debased manner in which it is used to oppress, control and where necessary, erase, any points of opposition. In this context Benjamin draws a clear distinction between what he describes as historicism and material historiography. As he writes:

Historicism rightly culminates in universal history. Materialistic historiography differs from it as to method more clearly than from any other kind. Universal history has no theoretical armature. Its method is additive; it musters a mass of data to fill the homogenous, empty time. Materialist historiography, on the other hand, is based on a constructivist principle. Thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well. Where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration pregnant with tensions, it gives that configuration a shock, by which it crystallizes into a monad.9

For Benjamin, historicism is situated within a linear narrative structure, a process he likens to stringing “beads along a rosary.”10 As Benjamin sees it, this formulation of history is problematic not only because it creates an illusion of coherent meaning that does not actually exist, but also because underpinning this narrative illusion, hidden deep within the language of historicism, is a theological metaphysics that acts to obscure the present. In effect, the theological imperative in historicism generates a type of Ur-history, an epic-mythology that turns away from the present and instead reaches both back into the past and forward into the future. As a consequence, the transcendental desires located within theology become embedded within a flattened, empty history,

9 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Ardent, trans. Harry Zohn (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955; New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 262-263. Citations refer to Schocken edition.

10 Ibid., 263. 71 a process that erases the political contingency of the now. Thus the present as history is universalised and emptied out. From Benjamin’s point of view this is disastrous as it permits the totalitarian expression of theological historicism, whether in the guise of utopian or dystopian politics, to bring the phantasmagoria of the present under its ideological sway.

In response to historicism’s impoverished theological construction of progress, Benjamin argues for a materialist historiography that recuperates the present (the now) within the temporal and the visual. In this sense Benjamin relates this historiography to an image or a memory that flashes up “at a moment of danger.”11 In this flash, materialist historiography both illuminates historicism’s fraudulent conceptualisation of empty time and simultaneously blasts it apart; replacing it with the fragmented actualisation of the messianic now, in which history as the present exists within a constellation of possibilities and difference. In this process, not only is the universal plane of historicism exposed, but also revealed are the politics hegemony that draw upon homogenous epic history to validate and consolidate the position of the victors.

Central to Benjamin’s conceptualisation of materialist historiography and its power to illuminate or blast apart empty homogenous time, is the role of semiotic contradiction. For Benjamin, historiography’s potential lies in bringing together disparate images/thoughts that in their extreme contradiction deliver a shock to the mind’s eye. This caesura is the product of what Benjamin refers to as the dialectical image or dialectical materialism. Unlike Hegel’s dialectical method, which arrives at a synthesis or union of an idea by addressing opposing points of view, the function of Benjamin’s dialectical image and more broadly speaking materialist historiography, is to rupture the ideological urge towards synthesis. For Benjamin it is precisely the incompatibility of the chosen ideas or images, their resistance to synthesis that makes them most productive. Thus in The Arcades Project: Benjamin describes the dialectical image as:

11 Ibid., 255. 72 Not that what is past casts its light on what is present, or what is present its light on what is past; rather image is written wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation. In other words: image is dialectics at a stand still. For while the relation of the present to the past is purely temporal, the relation of what-has-been to the now is dialectical: not temporal in nature but figural . Only dialectical images are genuinely historical – that is, not archaic – images. The image that is read – which is to say, the image in the now of its recognisability – bears the highest degree the imprint of the perilous critical moment on which all reading is founded.12

In this passage, as with the quote from the “Theses on the philosophy of History”, materialist historiography and the dialectical image are associated with a process of thinking that is both in motion and at a standstill. This temporal formulation provides the spatial framework, a language of movement and stasis that Benjamin uses to evoke the metaphoric shock/blast associated with dialectical materialism. However while the affective force resulting from this blast, speaks to the spatial impact of the dialectical image upon homogenous empty time, for Benjamin this metaphoric configuration is tied to a material understanding of the dialectical image.

In this context the dialectical image is first and foremost a methodology mediated through visual material. This process Benjamin clearly associated with the Surrealist/ Dadaist formulation of montage, in which unrelated images are juxtaposed one against another so as to produce a discordant artwork. As Susan Buck-Morss argues in The Dialectics of Seeing, for Benjamin the process of montage whether visual or textual occupied a central position within The Arcades Project.13 The significance of montage for Benjamin relates as much to its applicability to processes and people as to the art practice itself. Thus, in a move that builds upon his early discussion of the allegorical fragment in Baroque theatre, Benjamin in the Arcades Project and his essay “Theses of history”, extends the allegorical ruin of language/history out into the dialectical material of the street, finding in the detritus and the garbage of capitalism’s new age of progress

12 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982; Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), 463. Citations are to the Harvard University Press edition.

13 Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project, (Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1991), 67. 73 an array of fragmented remains, which in crystalised form speaks to the “irresistible decay” of history.14

Benjamin’s dialectical image then, as Max Pensky writes, “stands at the crossroads of a Marxist-inspired insight into the dialectical nature of the commodity structure, on the one hand, and a notion of montage and its implicit revaluation of the world of the devalued material object on the other.”15 The task of the dialectical image and materialist historiography on the one hand is to critique the illusion of mythic progress embedded within all expressions of Modernity, including technology, commerce, politics, language, culture, and history. On the other hand Benjamin’s work continually strives to move beyond the negative signification of representation. To that end his approach is wary of the philosophical structuring of language above or apart from the everyday. Benjamin’s praxis, that is, his material exploration of Modernity, turns upon a dialectical image and a materialist historiography that, in exploding/ blasting apart the representation of mythic history, opens hegemonic ideology up to a constellation of productive possibilities. The heterogeneous expression of language and history within the allegorical fragment/ruin, thus reformulates difference, in all its forms, as a positive rather than negative mechanism.

In the context of both my art practice work and the accompanying thesis, Benjamin’s materialist historiography and his parallel formulation of the dialectical montage operate together as the methodological framework that underpins my conceptual and material concerns. The figure of the convict functions as the fulcrum between the two. Blasted out of the linear articulation of Australian European history, the crystalised fragments of convict representation are incorporated into and juxtaposed beside the present as a means of bringing to light the marginalised debris repressed within Australia’s colonial imagination. Thus, situated across a constellation of Gothic

14 Walter Benjamin, The Origin Of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963; London: Verso, 2009), 178. Citations are to the Verso edition.

15 Max Pensky, “Method and Time: Benjamin’s Dialectic Images,” in The Cambridge Companion To Walter Benjamin, ed. David S. Ferris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 187. 74 differences, the re-animated convict form speaks to an array of spectral appendages and partial remains that continue to haunt the reproduction and representation of European heterosexual masculinity in Australia.

In incorporating Benjamin’s materialist historiography with a type of cultural spectrology I am drawing upon professor Avery F. Gordon’s spectral reading of Benjamin’s work. For professor Gordon the relationship between the dialectical image and materialistic historiography can be likened to a type of spectral doorway, marking the threshold between radically different worlds/insights. As Avery F. Gordon contends, Benjamin uses the notion of blasting as a:

...method of dialectics that reconstructs a lifework by following the scrambled trail the ghost leaves, picking up its pieces, setting them down elsewhere. Blasting might be conceived as entering through a different door, the door of the uncanny, the door of the fragment, the door of the shocking parallel. Entering one place, another often emerges in juxtaposition, along the lines of defamiliarization coalescing into a moment of connection, a configuration. Through this door a certain kind of search is established, one that often leads along an associative path of correspondences that invigorates Benjamin’s montage-based constructivism.16

In re-configuring the dialectical image around the armature of the spectral door, Gordon bypasses the epistemological anxiety concerning the authenticity of contemporary dialectical images emphasising instead the structural form of dialectical materialisms. Thus if we imagine a constellation of doors and each door as a different dialectical image/moment, a path opens up, through this Benjaminian translation, for ‘the now’ to be actuated within a materialist dialectical framework.

What links the dialectical image and materialistic historiography so productively together is the performativity of representation. As Gordon writes:

Benjamin’s materialist historiography depends fundamentally on animation, on being able to demonstrate to others the moment in which an open door comes alive and stops us in our tracks, provoking a different kind of encounter and

16 Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, 2nd ed. (Regents of the University of Minnesota, 1997; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 66. Citations refer to 2008 edition. 75 recognition. And for that, the quickening experience of haunting is essential.17

In the context of my thesis Gordon’s “quickening experience of haunting”18 is thus formulated not only around the materialist historiography of the convict but also significantly around the dialectical materiality of my practice. In this sense the affective force of convict masculinity as addressed by materialist historiography, is only blasted apart, only prised open when combined with the dialectical actuality of the convict image or moment. Thus the fragmentation of convict masculinity addresses not only questions of history but also questions of aesthetics. This teasing apart of convict representation and European heterosexual masculinity in the Benjaminian sense, turns upon the textility of my work, or the manner in which the convict form as text productively haunts/cannibalises the materiality of my textile practice.

2.3 – Paper cuts

In the field of contemporary Australian visual art, the use of cannibalism to aesthetically investigate history, identity and materiality brings to the fore the work of Sally Smart. In Smart’s interdisciplinary practice, the representation of Australian female identity is located within a surreal landscape pieced together with fragments of memory, history and place. Smart’s material process re-constructs moments of marginalised experience by cannibalising the dominant narratives of gender, sexuality and national identity. Smart’s exploration of female identity may at first seem somewhat at odds with my own preoccupation with masculinity. However intersecting through our particular expressions of gender is a shared desire to problematise and disturb the ideological reproduction of identity as a whole. Smart’s speculative approach to the psychological under-currents that flow beneath the surface of our cultural/social imagination, in conjunction with her cannibalistic process and use of materials, encompass a constellation of concerns that align closely with my own.

17 Ibid., 67.

18 Ibid. 76 This cannibalistic aesthetic consequently generates an array of productively open-ended possibilities. However embedded within this approach is a problematic question regarding the parameters of the term. The nature of this query revolves around the issue of metaphor and symbolic relevance in the context of visual practice. In effect if all art in one-way or another consumes other art, it could be argued that cannibalism, as a process, is endemic to the entire discursive field of visual culture; its very ubiquity undermining its classifying significance. Such a proposition however belies the difference between cannibalism as a meta-concept and as an individual practice. While all art can be generically linked to cannibalism, the temporal/abject materiality deployed by artists such as Sally Smart and Adam Cullen differentiates their work from those practices for which cannibalism as a conceptual method or visual process is of little or no concern.

Though trained as a painter, Smart’s practice is best known for large-scale installations in which whole rooms are occupied by collaged cut outs pinned to the walls. Made up of a range of textiles including paper, canvas and felt, Sally Smart’s work consists of surreal dreamlike spaces in which semi-figurative forms are suspended from the wall, hanging like ghostly apparitions. Smart’s material process is thus underpinned by a Gothic aesthetic structured around a raft of grotesque hybrid images. Incorporating elements of both the shadow and the monstrous, these grotesque images construct a figural entity that conjoins the cannibal and the spectre together. This hybrid entity disturbs the unified signification of representation by threatening to haunt the hegemonic formulation of ideology from one direction while at the same time also consuming it from another. In this way, as literary professor Graham Huggan writes, “ the cannibal ghost inhabits the interstices of the recognisable past; its discontinuous form eludes attempts at historical identification. The countermemory it instantiates functions on a principle of uncontrollable heterogeneity.”19 While professor

19 Graham Huggan, “Ghost Stories, Bone Flutes, Cannibal Countermemory,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 140. 77 Huggan’s formulation of the cannibal ghost is directed towards questions of Caribbean representation, its broader heterogenic implications resonate powerfully within Smart’s own practice.

If we look at the installation The Exquisite Pirate (South China Sea) (Figure 1) the methodology of the cannibal spectre unfurls itself around Smart’s incorporation of the materiality of textiles with the constructive processes of collage, montage and assemblage. The Exquisite Pirate is part of an ongoing project that utilises the image of the female pirate to unpack questions of gender, power, representation, and history. In this installation view, the pirate ship seems to hang listlessly on the wall. Constructed from an array of different textiles, the scaffolding, masts, sails, and ropes are entwined together. This derelict formulation conveys a sense of Gothic decay that gives the work a haunted feeling. In effect the vessel reads as a ghost ship, a spectral allegory of female identity. At the same time hanging from the bow of the ship are the partial remains of a human skeleton. This figure with all of its meat and tendons removed, alludes to the cannibalistic materiality of Smart’s approach, in which images such as the pirate ship are composed from the bones, the material scraps of other cannibalised textiles.

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS

Figure 1. Sally Smart, The Exquisite Pirate (South China Sea), 2007. Detail. Mixed media, size variable.

78 The allegorical materiality of the pirate/ghost ship however addresses not only questions of female identity but, more broadly speaking, questions of Australian national identity. The construction of the ship out of the collaged remains of other textiles is analogous to the construction of European Australian identity out of the fragmented ruins of convict representation. Both are structured around a process of recomposition, in which the aesthetic/historic Subject is re-animated through the stitching together of waste material. The formulation of European Australian identity/gender is thereby mediated through an additive process that for Smart (and myself) not only addresses the constructive mechanism at play around identity but also provides a means of creatively refashioning this marginal grotesque past around a positive articulation of difference.

As Sally Smart explains:

One of the things about pinning to a wall is it’s a two dimensional space but I create a deep space. There is a degree of artificiality in my work – influenced by mannerist art and the shallow picture space and showing that things were constructed. The space is a much more psychological space. You become simultaneously aware of the artificiality of the space.20

The very flatness deployed in her practices, in conjunction with the use of textiles and collage, thus evokes the artificial manner in which the representation of European Australian identity, gender and history are constructed, performed and cannibalised.

This overlap between the past and the present, history and memory are qualities that are particularly evident in the installation piece Shadow Farm (Figure 2). First constructed in 2001, Shadow Farm references Sally Smart’s childhood growing up in the South Australian countryside. Made up of a compendium of rural objects, structures and animals, Shadow Farm is history as confabulation. Akin to a type of textile frieze or base relief, Shadow Farm incorporates autobiography, fiction and place together in order to explore the temporal and cultural instability located around Australian identity. In the case of Shadow Farm, the emblematic objects used such as a tractor, gate, farmhouse and water tank evoke a quality of melancholic entropy through both their partial re-construction and their interaction with the walls of the gallery. Structured

20 Owen Craven, “Sally Smart,” Artist Profile., Melbourne, Art Fair Special, 19 (2012): 68. 79 this way, these fragmented objects occupy a material and temporal space that closely parallels Benjamin’s dialectical image. Like the dialectical image, Smart’s installation work can be read as a type of performative explosion; the trace of which is left behind in the material fragments scattered across the gallery wall. Thus the objects and implements that comprise Smart’s Shadow Farm embody the afterglow of this blast; a constellation of historical ruins which, in a Benjaminian sense, “flashes up at the instant when it can be recognised and is never seen again.”21 This transitory moment illuminates those marginalised entities/traumas of the past that occupy the catastrophic shadows of the present.

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS

Figure 2. Sally Smart, Shadow Farm, 2001-04. Detail. Mixed media, size variable.

In the context of Shadow Farm, European Australian history/identity thus presents as something akin to Benjamin’s materialist historiography. The stories blasted piece by piece up onto the gallery walls, represent the fragmented filaments of our repressed and vanquished past. As a consequence, the array of dilapidated objects Sally Smart retrieves from her personal past - the farm, shed, gate and house - speak allegorically to the material condition of disintegration and degradation that dominate our collective imagination. This process connects us not only to the interiority of

21 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy,” 255. 80 Smart’s personal psyche, but also to the exteriority of the Australian landscape and the innumerable piles of rusted metal and abandoned farms that are scattered across the continent and slowly being reclaimed by the Australian environment. This inability to incorporate itself into the landscape speaks to the European Subject’s failure to establish any sense of narrative cohesion or permanence.

This disconnect between landscape and Subject is evoked in Shadow Farm through the temporal nature of its installation, as well as through its contradictory relationship to the wall itself; in which the art work is both of the wall but also separate from it. Through this dialectical tension a sense of dissonance is established between object and surface, between subject and place, that parallels the European experience of the Australian environment. The European interaction with the Australian landscape thus remains resolutely superficial. As Maria Kunda writes in the catalogue essay for Shadow Farm:

Though there may be some of the perfume of nostalgia in the shadows, there is also a whiff of superstition, something darker. Carcasses and crows, ailing machinery: Shadow Farm is a thicket of repressed histories which can’t be fenced off. It admits something about our relationship to this land which goes back to the condition of its colonial cultivation.22

For Maria Kunda, Shadow Farm conveys a sense of European dysfunction that speaks to an array of repressed histories associated with our colonial heritage.

In the material construction of Shadow Farm, Smart re-animates a spectral past haunted by its own narrative uncertainty. It is an uncertainty that in the context of this thesis is intimately tethered to the instability associated with convict representation. At the centre of this ontological crisis stands the figure of the convict, whose grotesque deviant masculinity is fettered to a fractured repetition of individual and national identity. European Australian identity is structured around a model of appropriation or collage in which our national image is constructed through a process of mimetic

22 Maria Kunda, “Catalogue Essay,” in Sally Smart: Shadow Farm (Bendigo: Bendigo Art Gallery, 2001), 21. Exhibition catalogue.

81 reproduction; a process that in effect cannabilises external forms of representation in order to generate a sense of cultural meaning.

2.4 – Convict porn stars

In my practice the representation/deconstruction of national and gendered identity is articulated around the material repetition of the convict form. Within this aesthetic manifestation the convict body functions as a type of Benjaminian dialectical image. Structured across a constellation of intensities and differences, the dialectical convict addresses the Gothic undercurrents that flow beneath the official formulation of European Australian history. My practice utilises a type of cannibalistic aesthetic, consuming and recycling its material form as a means of pedagogically speaking to questions of content. In this way my work, like that of Sally Smart’s, deliberately draws upon an aesthetic of fragmentation and ruin to re-animate those histories, desires and Subjects who have been marginalised and pushed to the edges of representation. While my work differs from Smart’s in its exploration of masculinity, underpinning both our practices is a desire to excavate the spectral histories that continue to reside within and haunt the European imagination.

For Benjamin the process of excavation relates not so much to the digging up of the historical past, as the turning over of the cultural present. In this light the past as an historical moment in its own right can never be retrieved and attempting to do so is the domain of historicism; instead, for Benjamin, the formulation of the past as an agent of contingency is predicated upon incorporating fragments of the past alongside the ruins of the present. As Benjamin writes:

He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. This confers the tone and bearing of genuine reminiscences. He must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil. For the matter itself is only a deposit, a stratum, which yields only to the most meticulous examination what constitutes the real treasure hidden within the earth: the images, severed from all earlier associations, that stand - like precious fragments or torsos in a collector’s gallery - in the prosaic rooms of our later understanding.23

23 Walter Benjamin, “ A Berlin Chronicle,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974-1976; London: NLB publishing, 1979.), 314. Citations refer to NLB edition. 82 History for Benjamin is analogous to the material matter of language that surrounds a past constituted of fragmented images. The past, like the present, is a constellation of imagistic entities/objects which traverse across the optical unconscious.

Commensurate with this task of historical excavation, my work draws upon the aesthetic processes of montage in order to rupture, or, as Benjamin would have it, blast apart the empty homogenous representation of history. Importantly the conceptual and visual impact of montage relies upon the composite parts retaining a recognisable vestige of their previous form. In this way, the incongruous shock generated by montage is a result not only of the gap between the various elements but is also a product of the gap between the fragment’s current representation and its previous form. As a method of critique, the role of montage is particularly evident in the series, The Cinematic Remains of a Convict Porn-Star. Comprising six previously worked-up linocuts, the black and white prints have each had a large oval section cut out from the center. These cut out sections have then been reoccupied with flattened areas of coloured paper covered with marks made from silver pen.

In The Cinematic Remains of a Convict Porn-Star: Part 3 (Figure 3) the linocut element of the image depicts the figure of a convict lying on the ground with a caravan directly behind him and the removed oval space in the center contains an area of enamel pink covered in silver dots. Like a piece of skin that has been peeled away, or a peep hole onto another dimension, the existence of this pink counter-space refuses aesthetic or narrative cohesion through its dissonant otherness. The clash between these two distinctly different areas acts to disrupt the hermetic or naturalised plane of figurative signification. In effect, the spatial rupture that occurs within the picture plan speaks to the temporal rupture located around the convict form; the incursion of this pink counter- space revealing a constellation of marginal convict fragments embedded in the now. In a Benjaminian context the shock effect generated by the dialectical materialism of this image thus disturbs/blasts apart the homogenous strictures that underpin the essentialist linear formulation of Australian history.

83 The representation of the convict as Gothic Other within this image is open to a number of different readings. In one sense it resides within the silver dots/marks that float in the field of pink which, like particles of heat and light, carry the fragments of deviant masculinity and monstrous lack from the past into the present. Like stars in the sky they mark out both what has been, and though long gone, what still is. On the other hand the linocut convict figure can also been read as an agent of temporal disturbance, an expression of deviant masculinity spilling out from a schism in time; a figural materialisation of the silver fragments, bursting forth from a shattered or broken mirror.

Figure 3. Shannon Field, The Cinematic Remains of a Convict Porn-Star: Part 3, 2014. Mixed media, 44 x 59cm. Property of the artist.

Importantly when viewed through a Benjaminian lens, this actualisation of the convict within the aesthetic field of representation should be understood not as a type of mimetic response but rather as a performative one. In this sense the aesthetic fragmentation of convict masculinity is not a disinterested reflection of the ideological preoccupations embedded within representation, but is instead a concentrated demonstration of these preoccupations. As Benjamin argues, the dialectical function of montage is “to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal

84 of the total event.”24 Thus for Benjamin, art/visual culture can be read a constellation of spectral fragments whose crystal form demonstrates the broader mechanism of ideological representation. As a consequence the aesthetic fragment of convict representation is situated within a prismatic space that both refracts and conjoins together a spectrum of interrelated discourses concerned with history, technology and art. Visual culture then in all its forms, including that of the convict and convict masculinity, is a physical manifestation of ideology. The process of talking to such concerns thus necessitates the direct observance of their physical/imagistic form.

That visual culture plays such an integral part in the production and maintenance of hegemonic ideology is, according to Benjamin, the very reason that art/visual culture demands such close analysis. It is precisely the ubiquitous yet spectral presence of visual culture as the lens through which the world is viewed and performed, and that for Benjamin makes it ideally placed, when radicalised, to turn against and disturb the phantasmagoric dreams of universal progress and naturalised authority that protect and maintain the political and economic dominance of the ruling elite. As Benjamin writes:

The course of history as represented in the concept of catastrophe has no more claim on the attention of the thinking than the kaleidoscope in the hand of a child which, with each turn collapses everything ordered into new order. The justness of this image is well-founded. The concepts of the rulers have always been the mirror by means of whose image an “order” was established. – This kaleidoscope must be smashed.25

However for visual culture to smash the kaleidoscope of vulgar historicism requires not only the schism that opens up around Benjamin’s dialectical blast, but also the repeated insertion into this space of the marginalised Subject. It is only by obsessively turning and re/turning the ruin of marginal representation back into the material field of aesthetic sovereignty, that the spectre of the repressed may challenge the catastrophe of the now.

24 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 461.

25 Walter Benjamin, “Central Park,” trans. Lloyd Spencer and Mark Harrington, New German Critique, no. 34 (Winter, 1985): 34, http://www.jstore.org/stable/488338.

85 In the context of my practice this radicalised repetition subsequently extends out from the convict himself to the repetition of particular images, materials and body parts. Thus the fragmentation that is convict masculinity is linked to, and materialises around, not only the questions of gendered representation but also questions of visual and historical representation. In The Cinematic Remains of a Convict Porn-Star: Part 5 (Figure 4), the dialectical disturbance/tension in this image as in Part 3, is generated through the dissonant relationship between the central cut-out area of the artwork and the remainder of the linocut. In Part 5 the linocut print depicts a car either driving into or reversing out of a garage. The vehicle is rendered in the fashion of an x-ray, thus allowing the viewer to observe a male convict doubled up in the boot of the car.

At the same time looking down and possibly recording this scene is a CCTV camera. Intersecting through this scene is an area of blue that contains a number of discrete facial features including two noses, a mouth, and an eye.

Figure 4. Shannon Field, The Cinematic Remains of a Convict Porn-Star: Part 5, 2014. Mixed media, 44 x 59cm. Property of the artist.

Floating across this blue area without a face/body, these discombobulated facial features inhabit a hyper-textual space, part crystal, stomach, and cinematic screen. In a Benjaminian context it is within these internal realms that the monadological structure

86 of history is to be found. As Benjamin writes “this structure first comes to light in the extracted object itself. And it does so in the form of the historical confrontation that makes up the interior (and, as it were, the bowels) of the historical objects, and into which all the forces and interests of history enter on a reduced scale.”26 The monadological structure of history is closely aligned with Modernity’s turn towards cultural and industrial cannibalism. In this process objects of capitalism are willingly consumed/cannibalised, traversing from the arcades and the shops into the interior rooms and bowels of the consumer, where they become fossilised relics from the present. For Benjamin it is only at this point where the historical object loses its initial/ commercial meaning that its actual meaning becomes apparent. It is here, Benjamin argues that “historical understanding is to be grasped, in principle, as an afterlife of that which is understood; and what has been recognised in the analysis of the after-life of works.” 27 Historical objects resonate so powerfully at this point precisely because as ruins, they sit invisibly on our bookshelves, mantlepieces, tabletops and desks; they are unconscious/spectral fragments of our own material lives.

In a post-colonial context, the after-life of convict masculinity, like other spectral fragments, is not so much buried in the basement, as invisibly dispersed across the living rooms and bedrooms of the European Australian imagination. In The Cinematic Remains of a Convict Porn-Star: Part 5, this liminal quality of convict representation is evoked through the sense of temporal and spatial permeability that operates between the two fields of representation. As with Sally Smart’s work the rupturing of time and space unfolds within an aesthetic field that is simultaneously flat and deep, a dialectical image that is both in motion and at a standstill. The blue area in Part 5 could be described as the after-space that follows the blast of dialectical materialism, the caesura from which the castrated ruins of convict masculinity re-appear, or more precisely are re-remembered. For while the partial form of the convict body has been cannibalised

26 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 475.

27 Ibid., 460. 87 and buried within the catastrophe that is historical progress, the spectral fragments of convict identity/masculinity have remained resolutely attached to the present. My work seeks to convey both the repetitive manner in which masculinity, history and landscape are consumed and cannibalised in Australia, as well as the thematic relationship that links these concerns to the trauma of Australia’s antipodean relationship with Europe.

2.5 - There be monsters

The term Antipodes relates to the notion of one place being opposite to another. Consequently the Antipodes was conceived in part as the necessary geographic opposite and counter balance to Europe’s position in the northern hemisphere. However, over time this sense of being opposite spilled out from its geographic specificity and began to inform Europe’s broader understanding of the Antipodes. In this way the Antipodes came to encompass all things culturally and socially opposite or different to Europe, as Bernard Smith writes “the ancients had claimed that the Antipodes were different from things in the northern hemisphere; monsters dwelt there; the normal laws of nature did not hold, in fact, they were reversed.”28 At least three significant implications spring forth from this understanding of the Antipodes.

The first is that the Antipodes/Australia didn’t exist as an independent entity, rather it existed in relation to and was produced by Europe. Secondly Europe’s Antipodes is a site of monstrosity and inversion, and thirdly the historical continuity of Europe’s various fictional constructions of the Antipodes; stretching back over a thousand years, constitutes a discursive paradigm that dominated Eighteenth Century Britain’s representation and understanding of the Antipodes. When in 1788 Britain established a penal colony in the Antipodes, this moment of geographic/historic becoming was not implemented upon a blank slate but was instead overlaid on top of Europe’s pre-existing Antipodean fantasy. It is these combined Antipodean fantasies that have arguably formed the template for Australia’s understanding of itself, in terms

28 Bernard Smith, European Visions and the South Pacific 1768-1850: A Study in The History Of Art and Ideas (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 34. 88 of both national identity and gender/masculinity. Peter Deilharz argues that what lies at the centre of Europe’s Antipodean construction is a kind of “master-slave relationship.”29 or a dialectical of power and control that plays out through both occupation and representation.

Another way to describe this relationship is through the post-colonial notion of Otherness. In this context Europe’s interaction and exchange with the Antipodes has never been an equal one; Europe has always regarded itself as the dominant, superior partner. This link between economic/military dominance and cultural/social superiority is certainly not unique to Europe, however throughout the period of Europe’s colonial expansion and invasions during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century, it was predominately the standard view. What distinguishes the colony of New South Wales from other colonial examples is its primary function as a penal institution. This design as island gaol effectively resulted in the deportation of over 160,000 convicts over the period of transportation to Australia.

As Robert Hughes contends “this was the largest forced exile of citizens at the behest of a European government in pre-modern history. Nothing in earlier penology compares with it. In Australia, England drew the sketch for our own century’s vaster and more terrible fresco of repression, the Gulag.”30 This forced removal of Britain’s own citizenry created in penal New South Wales a hybrid colonial form that initially failed to embody either the archetypal settler model or the occupying Imperial model. Slipping in between these two forms of colonial interaction, New South Wales is first and foremost a place of exile and the convicts sent here a Diaspora, displaced to the other side of the globe in order to help solve the problem of Britain’s antiquated and overcrowded prison system. There are other reason of course, both strategic and material for why Britain

29 Peter Deilharz, Imagining The Antipodes: Culture, Theory and The Visual in the Work Of Bernard Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 97.

30 Hughes, The Fatal Shore, 2.

89 established a colony in Australia, but none override the dominating desire to remove as many convicts as possible from England.

One of the traditional frameworks around which transportation to Australia is discussed, is along class lines. However less discussed, but arguably just as important as class, was gender in relation to the decision to transport convicts to Australia. The rise in Britain of a new working class populace also resulted in the development of new articulations of gender, sex and desire. The Industrial Revolution led to the ideological deployment of a range of discourses around sex. As Thomas Laqueur writes, “perverted sex was the sign of perverted social relations; the bodies of the dangerous classes were imagined as preternaturally fecund and productive of monsters.”31 Importantly Laqueur connects these ruminations upon sexual depravity not only with class but also gender. A type of hyper-deviant virility was associated with certain working class labourers, highlighting the almost hysterical anxiety that surrounded the working class performance of heterosexual masculinity.32

Concurrently the representation of the dangerous classes not only conflated perverted sexuality with masculinity but a raft of other social ills from criminality to insanity, as Jose’ B. Monleon writes in A Specter is Haunting Europe:

The general trend during the eighteenth century, then, was to create a marginalised periphery in the social imagination that encompassed everything that rested outside of order and that by force of association colored all the components with the same taint of unreason and threat. From madness to idleness, from crime to pauperism, from riot to the formation of the new working class, an identical global metaphor of the negation of order - the metaphor of unreason – would conceal together.33

31 Thomas Laqueur, “Sex and Desire in the Industrial Revolution,” in The Industrial Revolution and British Society, ed. Patrick O’Brien and Roland Quinault (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 118.

32 Ibid., 117.

33 Jose’ B. Monleon, A Specter is Haunting Europe: A Sociohistorical Approach to the Fantastic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 29.

90 For Monleon this marginalised periphery embodies the projected fears of bourgeois masculinity, fears which related directly to the performance of new forms of heterosexual masculinity.34 In this light the establishment of Australia as a penal colony functioned in part as an attempt to minimise the threat of contamination that this new mode of masculine identity represented to the existing hegemonic order.

2.6 - Un-natural lives

In a literary context many of the anxieties related to this conflation of class, criminality and deviancy, are directly and indirectly explored by Marcus Clarke in his novel For The Term of His Natural Life (1874). The plot for Clarke’s novel is structured around the character of Rufus Dawes who is convicted for a crime he didn’t commit and sentenced to transportation to the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land. Once in the colony, Dawes undergoes a series of misfortunes that expose him to the violent experience of convict life but which also enable him, if only briefly, to find love in the form of the character Sylvia Vickers. Both Dawes and his beloved Sylvia die together at the end of the novel in a storm out at sea.35

The novel’s melodramatic exploration of various forms of political, social and personal injustice parallels the historical Romanticism of texts such as Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo (1846), and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations

(1860). However Clarke’s visceral description of both the physical violence associated with convict life in conjunction with a brooding, foreboding description of the space/ environment located around the convicts, gives For The Term of His Natural Life a decidedly more Gothic sensibility. This quality hollows out the redemptive closure of Romanticism so often marked by success or freedom, replacing it with a melancholic loss associated with death and displacement. Clarke directly links both the emotional

34 Ibid., 92.

35 Marcus Clarke, For The Term of His Natural Life (First published Melbourne, 1874; Melbourne: Penguin Group, 2009).

91 and physical death of the convict subject to the displacement and violence embedded within the entire penal system; a relationship that in the context of the novel is overrun with a gothic sensibility.

As Gerry Turcotte writes in Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fictions:

In His Natural Life … Clarke enters layer upon layer of deeper prisons … All these loci intensify the idea of a Gothic fear of separateness or separation (an isolation almost greater than the destructive tie with a centre because it represents complete disembodiment). For the colonial, separateness is not the ultimate I, but the ultimate not-I: empty space.36

In this sense, Dawes’ journey through the penal system in For The Term of His Natural Life, is marked by a proliferation of different forms of imprisonment and a downward trajectory of ever-increasing punishments and violence, which act to isolate and disembody Dawes, not only from the past and from his home, but also from himself.

As such, like the character Marlow in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, Dawes’ physical journey is emblematic of his psychological descent into the dark recesses of the European imagination. Consequently, the figure of Dawes functions as both an individual point of psychological address, and at the same time also as a witness to the broader debilitating effects of the entire system itself. Dawes’ failures and his death at the end of the novel, points to an inability on the part of both Dawes, as well as the colony itself, to transcend the origins of their carceral isolation and the semiotic erasure of self that this isolation conferred upon the convict body politic.

The Gothic materiality of the novel speaks to a carceral system that works upon/ cannibalises not only the convict’s sense of sovereignty, humanity, and class but also upon the formulation of masculine identity. The corrosive implications of the penal environment upon the convict body conflate around a point of deviant origin that marks the narrative conception of a monstrous convict progeny. For the convicts, the year 1788

36 Gerry Turcotte, Peripheral Fear: Transformations of the Gothic in Canadian and Australian Fiction (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2009), 116.

92 is a moment of temporal rupture, a monstrous point of displacement that configures around them a narrative of non-origin. Thus the convict form appears to arise like some monstrous un-natural species from the stillborn remains of the semiotic dead, doomed to wander aimlessly around in search of a past or an origin it can never find or access; forever lost to itself and its masculinity.

For the anti-transportation movement of the 1830s this conception of convict masculinity as monstrous and deviant subsequently becomes conflated around sensationalised discourses of sexuality, and in particular, the sexual act of sodomy. As cultural historian Dr. Kirsty Reid writes in Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia:

The colonial disorder produced by the Molesworth Committee and a host of other critics of convict transportation were thoroughly grounded in a set of idealised notions of gender, family and domesticity. For liberal and humanitarian opponents of the system, its apparent reliance upon slave labour was antithetical to the self-governing and independent masculinity that they deemed to be both natural and desirable. The de-civilising effects of the convict system, upon both settlers as well as convicts, were considered, in turn, to have fostered deviant, immoral and even ‘unnatural’ sexual propensities and profoundly disordered families. The physical effects were disastrous: the system was denounced as a disease and a pollutant, spreading through the individual body as well as infecting and contaminating the wider body politic. In the eyes of the Colonial Reformers, in particular, these conditions had created a crisis of reproduction: generating a race of increasingly ‘savage’ offspring in the colonies, provoking a profound deterioration of British character, and turning otherwise potentially productive and healthy imperial spaces into alien nations.37

Dr. Reid’s description foregrounds a confluence of prejudicial anxieties directed towards the reproduction of convict masculinity and sexuality. Anxieties which, both in England as well as the new colony itself, only seemed to confirm the upper/middle classes’ pre- existing perceptions of the lower classes as base sexual animals; who in their monstrous deviancy failed to comply with the desirable or ‘natural’ expression of hegemonic masculinity. However, within these discourses of convict deviancy, and the attendant perception that such un-natural acts harboured an eminently powerful force of Gothic

37 Kirsty Reid, Gender, Crime and Empire: Convicts, Settlers and the State in Early Colonial Australia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 196. 93 evil, another anxiety can be read; an anxiety which paradoxically formulates around the feminisation of masculinity. In this light what was most disturbing about convict homosexuality was not that it might turn these men into hulking, hyper-men but rather the opposite, that it would dissipate their masculine energies and that it would feminise and weaken them.

The social anxiety located around convict homosexual masculinity wasn’t so much directed towards the act itself but rather to the potential ruination of the ideological representation of heterosexual masculinity itself. The reproduction and performance of Australian identity/masculinity is intimately structured around a sense of impotency in relation to the ideological inscription of hegemonic authority. This is an impotency that, in the gendered environment of Australia’s convict history, resonates around a form of a narrative failure.

It is at this point that we start to find a distinct historical convergence between the issues of masculinity, class and property with the notion of Terra Australis. The establishment of the latter ‘penal Australia’ is reliant upon the fictional construction of the former, the Antipodes or Terra Australis. It is precisely because the Antipodes already existed in the European psyche as a site of inversion and monstrosities that Britain was able to project the idea of a penal settlement onto the poorly sketched geographic continent; after all what better place to dispatch this monstrous constituency than to an island of monsters? Consequently, the process of transportation in terms of person, place and gender embodies a tripling of the monstrous that represents not only a terrifying act of social and cultural rejection, but also inscribes and affirms their inherent monstrous nature in an act of negative interpellation that continues to influence contemporary Australia’s sense of both national identity and heterosexual masculinity.

2.7 - Lest we forget

The construction and mediation of a country’s founding moment is as contested and problematic as are questions of national identity and history. Furthermore, any 94 discussion concerning the importance of the founding of European Australia is inevitably more about the present than the past. In this context the significance of a nation’s founding moment lies in its contribution to the production and reproduction of meaning. Thus while foundation politics, as with national identity and history, do often get entangled in competing discourses of truth, the underlying force driving their continued relevance is the subjective formulation of desire. The power of a nation’s founding moment resides within the symbolic imagination and the ability of such moments to translate the discourse of the personal and private into the national and the public, thereby providing a necessary book end for the narrative creation of both nation and Subject. It is this desire for a narrative understanding of self that necessitates a mythic point of origin, a beginning that circulates the past into the present.

In an article entitled “When Do Collective Memories Last? Founding Moments in the United States and Australia”, historical sociologist Lyn Spillman elaborates upon the ongoing relevance of foundation politics. Comparing the centenary and bicentenary celebrations of federation in both Australia and the United States, Spillman explores why some founding moments continue to exert influence upon the national imagination while others cease to play any significant role. Spillman believes that while founding moments are heavily constructed in the present, certain historical events contain more intrinsic symbolic weight and multivalence than others, thereby having a greater ongoing impact on discourses of national identity.

Such historical events Spillman describes as being “charismatically meaningful.”38 Spillman argues that the founding moments for both Australia and the United States played an important role in each country’s centenary celebrations. However during its bicentennial celebrations Australia, unlike the United States, no longer saw its foundation moment as historically relevant. Spillman suggests a number of historical and cultural reasons for this shift in Australia. However, for her the primary factor is the supposed lack of “semiotic flexibility” associated with Australia’s

38 Lyn Spillman, “When Do Collective Memories Last? Founding Moments in the United States and Australia,” in Social Science History 22, no. 4 (winter 1998): 468, http://www.jstore.org/stable/1171572 95 founding moment.39 While Spillman’s essay demonstrates the significance of foundation politics to a nation’s contemporary understanding of itself, the conclusions she draws in relation to Australia seem both problematic and flawed. This fragility, I believe, relates specifically to Spillman’s understanding/misunderstanding of what exactly constitutes Australia’s founding moment. Referring to both official and unofficial documents of the time Spillman notes the “constant references to the ‘founding moment’ of British settlement.”40 But just what sort of founding moment were they referring to? Only a paragraph later Spillman describes the silent avoidance of all things convict located around celebrations of “heroic stories” and “benchmarks of progress.”41

While Spillman notes the lack of convict discourse within Australia’s centennial celebrations, for her, what was celebrated was substantive enough to warrant being described as our founding moment. Conversely, I believe what is significant in both Australia’s centenary and bicentenary celebrations is not what was discussed but rather what wasn’t. After all what does it mean to celebrate a foundation moment in which the seminal events and protagonists from these moments, that is the convicts and the penal system, are virtually erased from all historical discussion? The transportation of these people and the lives they lived occupy the very centre of European Australia’s founding moment; without their presence any attempted celebration is a culturally empty gesture and a grotesque collective delusion. Spillman might argue that the apparent lack of national traction associated with the convicts in relation to Australia’s founding moment is because of their minimal semiotic flexibility, that as a group and a moment they lack historical charisma. However, I believe the ongoing marginalisation of the convicts from national discourses points not so much to a lack of significance, but rather the exact opposite; that is, an overflow of semiotic and cultural trauma which has been repressed and denied, continues to impact upon Australia’s collective imagination. In

39 Ibid., 469.

40 Ibid., 461.

41 Ibid., 461-462. 96 this way Australia’s ongoing struggle with national identity and the hyper-performance of contemporary heterosexual masculinity relates in part to the trauma of Australia’s convict heritage.

The disruptive and debilitating impact of traumatic events upon both the individual and the state are concerns explored by Susan J. Brison in the essay Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self. For Brison:

Human-inflicted trauma not only shatters one’s fundamental assumptions about the world and one’s safety in it, but also severs the sustaining connection between the self and the rest of humanity. Victims of human-inflicted trauma are reduced to mere objects by their tormenters: their subjectivity is rendered useless and viewed as worthless.42

The traumatic event in this sense isn’t a discreet moment located around a specific point in time; rather, once enacted such an event not only transforms the victim but also haunts them. As a result the impact of a traumatic event continues to exist within the Subject long after the physical interaction has passed.

Essentially, trauma is a process both felt and remembered. Brison refers to this process as ‘traumatic memory’ and locates it within both a cultural and individual framework. Trauma in this way moves back and forth between the two where it is on one hand positioned, constructed and disseminated through a variety of cultural mechanisms, yet on the other hand has a physical specificity. The way violence is worked upon and through the body, means traumatic memory is less symbolic and more sensory than narrative memory. In both cases whether in an individual or cultural context, Brison makes it clear that it is through the retelling of a traumatic event and the subsequent cultural recognition attached to this retelling that allows for the possibility of a process of renewal.

42 Susan. J. Brison, “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self,” in Acts Of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe and Leo Spitzer (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999), 40-41.

97 What happens then in the context of Australia’s convict heritage when there is a collective silence and resistance to listening to the cultural and individual trauma associated with this period? Brison notes that societies respond to such events by attempting to forget them as quickly as possible. However this process of cultural amnesia is arguably fraught from its inception, for as Brison writes “attempting to limit traumatic memories does not make them go away: the signs and symptoms of trauma remain, caused by a source more virulent for being driven underground.”43 Yet to what extent can Australia’s convict heritage be described as a traumatic historical moment? While most historians of Australian colonial history would probably agree that life for the convicts of this penal society could indeed be brutal at times, the extent and frequency of this brutality is open to debate.

For instance historians such as John Hirst and John Braithwaite acknowledge the violence and hardship many convicts experienced. However, for Hirst and Braithwaite only a minority of convicts suffered truly horrific treatment at the hands of brutal masters and government officials. The majority of convicts were in fact treated fairly but firmly. According to this position the fairness of this treatment relates not only on an individual level but also on a legal level. In this paradigm, convicts were afforded enough legal protection as well as structural progression within the penal code hopefully to seek social and economic reintegration back into colonial society once their sentencing period was complete. The ongoing survival of the penal colony was totally dependant upon the convicts having a stake in its success. On the other hand historians and cultural theorists such as Terry Smith, Henry Reynolds and David Coad argue for a broader understanding of the violence of Australia’s early convict history.

The convict experience of violence in this sense is expanded beyond the personal and the specific to encompass the structural, ideological and cultural milieu of convict society. As Henry Reynolds notes “the convict system was central to Australian experience during the first two generations of settlement. Violence, threat of violence,

43 Ibid., 49. 98 fear of violence were major features of the system. Transportation was meant to deter crime.”44 While many convicts may have been treated fairly by their masters, the effectiveness of the colony as a prison necessitated that, whatever their circumstances, all the convicts understood their continued proximity to institutionalised violence. The threat of violence, whether actual or witnessed collectively, located the convicts within a spatial, physical, and psychological environment intimately structured around the systematic reproduction and implementation of cohesive force.

The reproduction and performance of this violence was arguably located around four key areas. The first was through the initial process of transportation and exile. The second key area comprised the various technologies of punishment such as flogging, hanging, the treadmill and leg irons. A third arose from the establishment of secondary sites of incarceration such as Norfolk Island, Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour, and finally the various mechanisms of surveillance formed another act of violence. As a result, all the convicts were either directly or indirectly victims of this matrix of intersecting modules of violence. Significantly this violent environment also resonated upon the convict as a gendered and national Subject. Mapped across the emergent cartography of Australia’s colonial foundation, the unfolding practices of power and identity (when read within a gendered framework), articulate a moment of substantial Subject instability and trauma.

One of the central elements related to this process of gender instability was the use of the lash or flogging. Highly ritualised, the flogging of convicts both male and female was a conspicuously staged, carefully choreographed, theatrical event designed, on the one hand, to educate and deter both victim and audience from future criminal intent while, on the other hand, instill through fear and dread a submissive compliance towards all figures of authority. However, flogging not only disrupts the body, it arguably also impacts upon a Subject’s sense of gender. In this context flogging

44 Henry Reynolds, “Violence in Australian History,” in Australian Violence: Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Duncan Chappell, Peter Grabosky and Heather Strong (Canberra: Australian Institute of Criminology, 1991), 11. 99 represented an ongoing attempt to minimize the threat of working class masculinity. As David Coad argues:

A dominant and authoritarian colonial Other whipped submissive and docile colonized victims forced to take it like a man – or woman. Public whipping of half-naked male bodies by and in front of other males produces an ambiguous, sadistic scenario which is disempowering and feminizing, if not potentially homoerotic… The colonization of Australia by the English had an important counter-effect: the ‘colonization’ of male bodies. The master-slave dialectic at the centre of colonial authority was transposed, re-enacted in the convict population itself.45

Flogging in effect acted as a continual reminder of the convicts’ gender and class dysfunction, and the trauma of this gendered lack in turn spilled over from the individual to infiltrate the collective. Convicts made up the majority of the penal population during the period of transportation and of that population the vast majority were male. Everywhere the convicts gazed they saw predominately other male convicts. In this way the concentration of male convicts during Australia’s inception as a penal colony elevates the process of gender trauma and disturbance onto the national stage. Seen through the mechanism of flogging, the trauma of convict masculinity and national identity was experienced and reproduced, within and also across the convict body, in the form of the scars, blisters and cuts located across their backs. Thus the convict’s outer skin marked out the inner trauma of their monstrous selves.

For visual cultural theorist Professor Jill Bennett, the properties of skin provide a useful mechanism for elaborating upon the relationship between trauma, affect and art. As Bennett contends:

If the skin of memory is permeable, then it cannot serve to encase the past as other. It is precisely through the breached boundaries of skin in such imagery that memory continues to be felt as a wound rather than seen as contained other. One might say also, that it is through the breached boundaries of memory that skin continues to be felt as a wound rather than seen contained other, or as “past other” … it is here in sense memory that the past seeps back into the present, as sensation rather than representation.46

45 David Coad, Gender Trouble Down Under: Australian Masculinities (Hainaut-Cambresis, France: Presses Universitaires de Valenciennes, 2002), 18.

46 Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (California: Stanford University Press, 2005), 41-42. 100 Through this exchange between memory and skin, Bennett foregrounds the manner in which the affective breaching of one, bleeds into the felt experience of the other. For Bennett, art functions as a type of medium allowing the audience to remember exactly that which we choose to forget, namely the disturbing/debilitating presence of affect that is located around traumatic events. In this sense it isn’t the traumatic event itself which disturbs the audience so much as, the sensation of narrative chaos which accompanies moments of historic and cultural rupture.

The trauma associated with historical events such as the transportation of convicts to Australia doesn’t disappear but instead, like a form of cultural heavy metal, becomes embedded within the national psyche. The trauma generated around the performance of convict masculinity though forgotten or refused, continues to be felt in the present. Importantly, the role of memory Professor Bennett alludes to suggests that the force of trauma doesn’t just bleed between past and present, but also bleeds between body and place. In this way the interaction between body and landscape is central to an understanding of the importance that trauma can have upon the national psyche.

2.8 - Bad boy, bad boy

In the context of contemporary Australian art, the trauma associated with our colonial heritage and its attendant concerns with convict history, national identity and masculinity, brings my practice into contact with the artist Adam Cullen. Born in 1965, Cullen’s work transitioned during the 1990s through a range of methods and media before settling upon a painterly practice. Predominately figurative, this work is structured around a loose gestural approach in which the figure or figures lie on top of a flat often brightly coloured ground. In this way Cullen’s use of garish saturated colour conveys a sense of intense light which stands in start contrast to Sally Smart’s liminal representation of our cultural disjuncture.

Where Sally Smart explores the trauma of our personal and collective past within a Gothic world of ambiguity, shadows and darkness, Adam Cullen’s work addresses

101 these concerns within the clarifying glare of carnival. The notion of carnival and the carnivalesque as used here, refers to Mikhail Bakhtin’s exploration of the term in Rabelais and His World. The carnivalesque was a mode of social expression that existed during the middles ages in Europe. Located around specific periods of carnival time, “The carnivalesque,” Bakhtin writes, was marked by the “temporary suspension, both ideal and real, of hierarchical rank.”47 For Bakhtin, the carnivalesque was particularly expressed through carnival laughter and the grotesque. Carnival laughter encompassed everyone and no-one, it provided the freedom of distance from the traditional modes of social interaction thereby opening up the space around which carnival activities of social inversion were permitted. In a similar fashion, the grotesque of carnival revelled in the interaction of the abject body with the social body. In this way, Bakhtin argues that the grotesque of carnival and carnival laughter can be read as a means of political critique and social renewal.

However embedded within Cullen’s carnivalesque aesthetic is a Gothic sensibility. This incorporation of the two is a quality that for Gothic theorist Catherine Spooner marks out contemporary Gothic; generating a type of “Gothic-Carnivalesque hybrid in which ‘the sinister is continually shading into the comic and vice versa.”48 In this way, the affective force of the carnivalesque celebration of the absurd, the comic and the ridiculous is deployed in tandem with the Gothic aesthetic of the monstrous, the libidinal and the peripheral as a means to both critique and play with questions around the ideological construction of identity. This “Gothic-Carnivalesque,” hybrid represents a return to a mode of carnival humour which is manic, joyous and inclusive and a process of integration that re-orientates the Gothic Other back into a shared space with the subject. In effect, the monstrous other is not something separate, but is rather central to the construction of identity.

47 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Moscow: Khudozhestvennia literature, 1965; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 10. Citation refers to Indiana University Press edition.

48 Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 69.

102 Within Adam Cullen’s work, as within my own, this interplay between the humorous and the monstrous is a carnivalesque element used to foreground questions of personal and national trauma; questions that for both Cullen and myself are often located around a deviant representation of Australian masculinity. Rendered in a cartoonish manner, the men in Cullen’s world are often monstrous conflated forms in which human and bestial elements are combined. For instance Beezlebozo (Lubricated Goat) painted in 2003 (Figure 5) depicts a psychotic-looking clown with elongated ears and an erect penis menacingly reaching out with sharp clawing hands towards a greenish demonic looking goat whose own penis hangs flaccid between its legs. With its interplay between violence, the sexual body, the grotesque and masculinity, Beezlebozo

(Lubricated Goat) embodies a number of the central thematic concerns that continually reappear throughout Cullen’s practice.

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS

Figure 5. Adam Cullen, Beezlebozo (Lubricated Goat), 2003. Acrylic on canvas, 183 x 183cm.

The sense of grotesque carnivalesque violence is conveyed through both the content of his work, that is, through the bodily inscription of both male and female

103 genitalia, the phallus, breasts, vagina, as well as through the form or materiality of the paint itself. The latter is particularly so in relation to the figures, which are laid down in an aggressive, haphazard manner with colours bleeding from one area to the next and paint dribbling and dripping across the canvas. By juxtaposing the organs of human genitalia with a porous, permeable application of paint, Cullen evokes the abject libidinal forces of desire, lust and passion, which though constrained by the social rules and mores of the day, resist such social restrictions through the materiality of the body itself. The drips and dribbles of paint parallel the physical qualities of semen, pus and faeces which drip and dribble out of the body as well as the forces/drives of the psyche which slip through the pores of our social skin into the realm of the body politic.

As such, Cullen’s material approach to painting conveys a sense of ongoing emotional and physical instability which concerns not only an abject expression of the human form but one that also speaks directly to Australia’s national identity and the performance of masculinity in Australia. As Catherine Lumby writes, for Cullen, male

“sexuality is primal, clownish, grotesque and desperate.”49 This sense of masculine desperation permeates throughout Cullen’s work and, as with my own practice, functions as a marker pointing to not only the violence and the absurdity located around Australian masculinity, but also to the cultural and historical trauma associated with the male subject. For Wayne Tunnicliffe, this desperation in Cullen’s practice represents the ongoing failure of Australian masculinity, a failure that:

...can be found again and again in Cullen’s work: in flaccid bellied men, naked with impotent hanging genitals or covered up by saggy underpants, in dodgy drovers, businessmen, lawyers, bishops, clowns and creeps, in the men dressing up as women and the men dressing up as men. This male identity parade never lives up to expectations, theirs or ours, and yet the pathos of many of these figures also embodies something Australian – a gap between how we see ourselves and what we are, even when we appear most heroic.50

49 Catherine Lumby, “I’ve Been Alive for Ages,” in Adam Cullen: Let’s Get Lost, curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008), 100. Exhibition catalogue.

50 Wayne Tunnicliffe, “Lets Get lost,” in Adam Cullen: Let’s Get Lost, curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008), 16. Exhibition catalogue. 104 Tunnicliffe’s invocation in Cullen’s work of ‘something Australian’ subsequently links together the dysfunctional, failed quality of Australian masculinity to that of a similarly failed expression of national identity. For Tunnicliffe the trauma of both these failures is generated through a gap between the image we have of ourselves and the reality of what we find.

In relation to not only my own practice but also my reading of Cullen’s work, the affective force of this space or gap is generated around the residual impact of our

European heritage or what Cullen refers to as our “Anglo-Celtic identity crisis”.51 In the context of Cullen’s practice this link between the trauma of our violent past, national identity and the contemporary performance of Australian masculinity is one that is directly remarked upon by Robert Cook in the essay, “Beauty, Banality and the Beast: I used to be Adam Cullen.” For Cook, Cullen’s practice is a salutary reminder that a certain mode of Australian masculinity; a simmering, violent and grotesque performance of masculine identity last seen in the 1970s is still very much present within contemporary Australia.52 While Robert Cook locates this exchange within a narrow time frame, its spectral form suggests the possibility for stretching the temporal interaction further back to include Australia’s convict heritage. The hysteria and trauma located around Cullen’s monstrous men expresses a form of masculine performance in Australia which threads its way back to Alexander Pearce and the other convict cohorts. The gap which Tunnicliffe suggests lies at the centre of Australian masculine identity could be described as the fractured convict experience, perpetually spinning in an unconscious drunken blur, the dark matter of Australia European cultural identity.

2.9 - Grand tours

In the context of my own practice, this interaction between place, trauma and violence is directly addressed in the artwork, What Goes on Tour, Stays on Tour: A

51 Ingrid Periz, Adam Cullen: Scars Last Longer (Melbourne: Craftsman House, 2004), 40.

52 Robert Cook, “Beauty, Banality and the Beast: I used to be Adam Cullen,” in Adam Cullen: Lets Get Lost, curated by Wayne Tunnicliffe (Sydney: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2008), 95. Exhibition catalogue. 105 Convict Zombie’s Journey Across Van Diemen’s Land - part one (Figure 6).

In this diorama a group of three convicts is located at the base of a mountain or hill; two of the convicts stand with their arms outstretched while the third convict, his head and limbs missing, lies on the ground with his back resting against a tree stump. The affective force of this diorama is located around the uneasy tension that resides between the absurdity of the scene depicted and its parallel sense of violence. In mood or tone, the absurd humour of this artwork is laid down in the first place through the use of a high key colour palette, in which the sky is glowing a fluorescent pink and the grass a shade of neon lime-green. This palette invokes a sense of hyper-physicality and emotional brightness or cheer; a quality which is further amplified through the erect phalluses attached to the three figures.

Figure 6. Shannon Field, What Goes on Tour, Stays on Tour: A Convict Zombie’s Journey Across Van Diemen’s Land - part one, 2013. Mixed media, 35 x 46 x 37cm. Property of the artist.

Excessively large and socially inappropriate, the display of these convicts’ penises consequently generates a sense of the ludicrous and the awkward that speaks to the absurdity of the scene set before us. At the same time the hyper-colours used in the diorama - in conjunction with the decapitated figure on the ground, the convicts’ erect phalluses and the clunky outstretched arms of the two standing figures - work together

106 to evoke an atmosphere of unfolding violence. This is an atmosphere which is amplified through the artwork’s title with its reference to the un-dead form of the convict zombie. The two convicts, with their arms raised up, reaching and grasping outwards evoke the classic cinematic zombie pose which denotes a certain aimless loss that relates not only to their relationship with themselves but also to the environment around them. As Steven Shaviro writes in The Cinematic Body:

Zombies are impelled by a kind of desire, but they are largely devoid of energy and will. Their restless agitation is merely reactive. They totter clumsily about, in a strange state of stupefied and empty fascination, passively drawn to still- living humans and to locations they once occupied and cherished. Only now they arrive to ravage, almost casually, the sites to which their vague memoires and attractions lead them. They drift slowly away from identity and meaning, emptying these out in the very process of replicating them.53

In this way there is no conscious connection between the zombies and the surrounding landscape, the construction of meaning attendant upon the processes of abstract thought has been lost to them. They do not see where they are, or for that matter, what they have become; they exist solely to consume the living. In short, they are lost to the world around them. The convict zombies with their mindless, unremitting desire for human flesh, point to a mode of cultural cannibalism that relates not only to the historical experience associated with Alexander Pearce, but more broadly the convict reproduction of masculinity as it unfolds in the Australian environment.

This liminal quality of Australian masculinity is addressed through the materiality of the paint, particularly as it is applied to the heads of the convicts. The enamel paint has been allowed to run in a loose, dripping manner down from the head across the body of each convict zombie. This process is also repeated around both the eyes of each figure, where the paint has pooled into asymmetrical elongated sockets of black, and the phallus, where the paint often drips away from the base of the penis.

53 Steven Shaviro, The Cinematic Body, Theory Out of Bounds 2 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 86.

107 Taken together, these various drips, pools and dribbles of paint function in a similar fashion to the blurred, drippy forms of Cullen’s grotesque, malformed men. The slippage and overflow of paint evokes a form of leakage or discharge that references the abject, porous performance of convict masculinity, as well as the cultural trauma attendant with this gendered uncertainty.

It is within the materiality of the paint itself that both Cullen and I address the question of Australian masculinity. Through the paint, through the dribbles and bleeding within and around the figures there is a sense in which the constitution of these monstrous grotesque men are being dissolved or cannibalised by the paint itself. In the process both Cullen’s practice, as with my own, talks to the partial, and corroded qualities which mark out not only the convict experience of masculinity but continue to impact upon the contemporary performance of Australian masculinity.

2.10 - The sleep of reason

In the context of cultural representation, the anxieties circulating around the convict’s deviant expression of masculinity manifest itself in two distinctly different ways. Within literary texts the convict body presents as an over-determined entity, endlessly discussed and worked upon. Viewed through the safe distance of the page, the figure of the convict in all its moral depravity and sexual monstrosity underscores the bourgeois fear concerning the possible return of the convict. However within this fear lies a trace of titillation that points to its opposite, that is, to a desire in fact for the convict’s return.

This desire for the return of the repressed finds particular resonance in Charles Dicken’s Gothic novel Great Expectations. First published in 1860/61, the plot of Great Expectations follows the journey of Pip from orphan boy through to adulthood. At the start of the novel Pip provides assistance to an escaped convict by the name of Magwitch, who Pip comes across hiding in a graveyard. Though later caught and

108 transported to Australia, Magwitch, out of gratitude, anonymously provides Pip with financial independence. In a postcolonial sense one of the central thematic concerns in Great Expectations relates to the monstrous return of the dead. The anxiety/desire induced by the return of the dead takes numerous forms throughout the novel, though perhaps none is more pertinent than that of Magwitch himself. Significantly, Magwitch’s convict history and his introduction to the reader in a graveyard evoke the gothic articulation of a violent and destructive Other. As Eleanor Salotto writes in relation to Great Expectations, the “convict serves as the figure par excellence for being dead/ alive. That is to say, socially he does not exist, but simultaneously he engenders all kinds of imaginative fancies in Pip’s mind.”54 The analogy Salotto makes between being a convict and being a type of social zombie foregrounds the affective force located around the convict figure; whose reconstructed body is overrun by base sexual drives. In this transgressive literary form, the convict’s Gothic masculinity simultaneously attracts and repels.

However, if in a literary context, convict representation presents as over- determined, in a visual one it presents as the opposite. Paradoxically, the convict figure in the visual arts is notable for its almost complete absence. As Terry Smith writes:

While we could not have expected the few commissioned oil paintings to deal with convictism, the scant treatment of it in the visual culture as a whole bespeaks a repression of the central fact of early colonial existence. Like sex in the Victorian era, it was much in evidence, constantly discussed, deeply feared, widely practiced but rarely represented.55

Smith’s likening of the visual repression of convictism to Victorian anxieties around sex alludes to the bourgeois conflation of deviant sexual preoccupations with a criminalised and working class performance of gender/masculinity. The convict’s ruptured form becomes the Gothic monster incarnate. They form a plague of grotesque beasts whose

54 Eleanor Salotto, Gothic Returns In Collins, Dickens, Zola and Hitchcock (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 122.

55 Terry Smith, Transformations in Australian Art: The Nineteenth Century – Landscape, Colony and Nation, Vol 1 (Sydney: Craftsman House, 2002), 40. 109 sexual depravities not only exceed the boundaries of class, but like a viral contagion threaten the sovereign body of the State. However the invisibility of the convict form within the visual arts perhaps attests to the alterity of images and the manner in which art - like the convict body - refuses to be incorporated cleanly into the cultural imagination. The purpose in both modes of representation is in effect the same, that is, to silence the semiotic and corporal power located around and within the convict form, either through over-determination in literary texts or the physical invisibility in visual images.

While contemporary cultural texts from popular history, to genealogy and film/TV, have sought to address the convict issue from various directions, when viewed through Benjamin’s smashed kaleidoscope these discussions have situated the representation of convict identity within a naturalised mode of history. Such texts, whether visual or literary, are primarily concerned with demonstrating the impossible truth of a mythic empty time, creating in the process a narrative fable of cohesive order that helps us sleep through the catastrophe of the now. Lost within this universal representation of empty time, these texts remain resolutely silent to the constellation of becoming that is Australia’s convict past. Haunting this reticent silence however are the cannibalised remains of convict masculinity. When these remains are juxtaposed against the present they generate a dialectical flash which illuminates not only the ongoing impact of Australia’s convict history upon gender identity today but also foregrounds the cultural trauma associated with the structural and ideological violence embedded within the penal colony itself.

110 CHAPTER THREE:

Fragments of a Suburban Dream

111 The previous chapter situated questions of Australian heterosexual masculinity and national identity around narratives of convictism. This chapter advances these concerns into the materiality of the near present. In this context the metaphor of the spectre is used to elaborate upon a series of liminal relationships, between the past and the present, landscape and memory, history and melancholy, which all intersect with and formulate around the national subject. Commensurate with this spectral analysis, the theoretical structure of this chapter primarily draws upon Walter Benjamin’s critical practice. Beginning with a discussion of the Australian film,The Boys, the chapter is made up of three sections. The first of these situates the interaction between Australian masculinity, Gothic literature and historical representation within Walter

Benjamin’s discussion of the aura. The second is concerned with the representation and inscription of marginalised identities, explored in part through Benjamin’s performative discussion of the phantasmagorical experience. The third section addresses the political/ psychological interaction between the suburban landscape and heterosexual masculinity. Within the context of my practice these concerns are in turn elaborated upon around a discussion of Kara Walker and Juan Davila’s work.

The Boys, based on Gordon Graham’s play of the same name, was released in 1998. The film follows three brothers over a period of twenty-four hours, starting with the release from prison of the eldest brother, Brett Sprague, and ending in the abduction, rape and murder of a woman.1 Interspersed throughout the film are a series of flash- forwards that act to fill out the narrative plot beyond the central period depicted. The focus throughout the film is primarily upon the perpetrators rather than the victim. The intention of this is not to absolve the men of their responsibility or guilt, but rather to foreground the broader social and political forces that have contributed to the cultural environment within which these particular men exist.

Central to these concerns is the thematic of violence, which is established during the opening sequence of the film through a montage of indistinct sounds and

1 The Boys, directed by Rowan Woods (Australia: Arenafilm and Australia film commission, 1998), DVD. 112 images that convey a quality of Gothic foreboding and malevolence. This sense of violent portent begins with a male voice, perhaps a train attendant reading out a list of upcoming stations that includes Cabramatta and Warwick Farm. Overlaid across the top of this are the sounds of a car engine turning over, an infant crying and a dull, rhythmic background noise. These disparate sounds are accompanied by what appears to be low- grade video/film footage tracking slowly across a series of shop frontages. Shot during the night this streaky and blurred vision establishes a disturbingly voyeuristic and predatory gaze that seems to emanate from within a car. This opening sequence then transitions from a suburban street to a highway enveloped in darkness.2

Panning from the streetlights, the camera focuses upon the road’s median strip while the melodic soundtrack continues to drift along and the film credits appear. At this point the exterior landscape of the road is replaced with the interior space of a suburban house. More credits then appear between a series of brief individual sequences that fade in and out. Each sequence is made up of a tightly cropped object in the house such as a round clothes hanger, the kitchen sink, a safe and a light switch. At the same time the incidental music seems to alternate between the repetition of two or three notes played on piano and drum with an electronic sound overlaid on top.3 In this way the sense of Gothic foreboding and impending violence established in the exterior nightscape bleeds into the internal space of the house, suggesting that the menace and dread evoked throughout this opening sequence is situated as much within a psychological framework as an environmental one.

3.1 - The invisible men

Concomitant to the Gothic atmosphere of oppression that permeates this opening sequence is a certain ghostly quality to the text. While this spectral presence is conveyed through filmic mechanisms such as the audio track, lighting and camera angles, the articulation of a ghostly other during this opening sequence is primarily

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid. 113 achieved through the corporal absence of a subject. Consequently the audience drifts through these opening scenes, witness to a cinematic gaze that is simultaneously present but body-less. Yet, the car and the house do suggest the presence of specific inhabitants, the traces of whom are embedded within the objects depicted on screen. The subtext suggested by this opening scene is that the characters’ visual absence is analogous with a type of cultural absence or marginalisation. In this way these unknown characters - both present, but absent - haunt the social periphery, seemingly lost to both themselves and the wider community.

The opening credits then transition to the film proper with Brett Sprague being released from jail. This is significant in so far as his prisoner status enhances the sense of a spectral reading of the film; for as Eleanor Salotto noted in the previous chapter, there is a strong parallel between our understanding of ghosts and prisoners.4 Both are socially marginalised by the broader community existing on the fringes, they are displaced and hidden, yet simultaneously also imagined and desired in a kind of frisson of horror. Subsequently convicts/prisoners, like ghosts, represent a type of transitional body which is neither absolutely present nor absent, their symbolic conception generating a form of excess which overrides their physical embodiment.

The symbolic excess located around and within the convict functions as a cultural metaphor, pointing to the ambiguous and conflicted relationship between culture’s homogenous articulation of itself in the present, and the chaotic, spectral fragments emanating from the past. In the context of this exchange a haunted quality exists between the living and the spectral prisoner, which relates to the non-meaning, non-functional elements located beyond the control of culture. These spectral elements in turn speak to the transgressive rupture associated with moments of trauma and violence, when meaning dissolves into the meaningless. It is for this reason that the spectral form is so closely aligned with the death or failure of comprehension and understanding. In Brett Sprague’s visage we thus encounter the spectral force of our

4 Eleanor Salotto, Gothic Returns in Collins, Dickens, Zola and Hitchcock (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 122. 114 convict history as it exists today. Like our prisons and their inhabitants, the convict past resides at the periphery of Australia’s emotional landscape. So when Brett Sprague steps out of the prison he does so carrying the weight of these cultural and spectral considerations. Read this way the minimisation of our convict history and its banishment to the margins of Australia’s cultural form, suggests an ongoing anxiety concerning the possible implications of this convict moment.

Within the fold of Australia’s cultural representation, the marginalisation of our convict history and its relocation towards collective myth and personal fable, takes numerous guises. For some it takes the form of indifference, for others it becomes a personal genealogy. In the field of Australian history it often manifests itself in the shape of empirical scepticism. In all these forms, this process of turning away could be expressed as a type of cultural blindness; a blocking out of the people, moments, and histories that are too difficult or too chaotic to incorporate cleanly into the collective imagination. In Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, Avery F. Gordon explores this notion of cultural blindness, writing that:

Today, the nation closes its eyes neither innocently nor without warning. It has renewed a commitment to blindness: to be blind to the words race, class, and gender and all the worldliness these words carry in their wakes; to be blind to only the most shrunken, formal, and value-laden official empirical actualities. This is a commitment struck, as has historically been the case, when fear of loss gets the better of what could be gained. What does it mean for a country to choose blindness as its national pledge of allegiance? Choosing blindness has serious consequences for all of us because race, class, and gender, already reifications of force and meaning, can be turned into what PatriciaWilliams calls “phantom words.” But as phantoms, they return to haunt.5

Gordon’s spectral analysis foregrounds three significant elements. First is the notion of cultural blindness or of turning away from the spectral body, second is the material repetition of history and third is the cultural return of the repressed. While Gordon’s exploration of the spectral properties of identity primarily addresses African-American relations in the United States, the implications of her analysis relate equally to

5 Gordon, Ghostly Matters, 207.

115 Australia’s problematic relationship with its own convict history and our desire to separate ourselves from this past. Thus while the affective force of these spectral objects can be sensed within the realm of the everyday, we resolutely repute their existence.

Yet, the degree to which the past as memory and narrative is as much in us, as it is out there, points to the impossibility of this action. As Avery F. Gordon suggests, the desire to erase that which we choose not to see calls into being the very spectral properties embedded within the discordant past which the hegemonic order so assiduously attempts to deny. In this way, to borrow Gordon’s words, when Australia as a nation chooses to be blind to its own historical past, when it chooses to turn away from its convict past, it opens up a space through which the spectres of that past, the marginalised remains of Alexander Pearce and Brett Sprague are re-animated anew. Consequently the interaction between repression and return upon which spectral identity is predicated, calls forth and intersects through the politics of trauma. The sense of degraded signification associated with traumatic episodes is often paralleled by a sensation of spectral, haunted loss. As Erica L. Johnson writes in Giving Up The Ghost: National And Literary Haunting in Orlando:

Ghosts signify a traumatic history to which haunted subjects do not otherwise have access, and here the phantoms of psychoanalytic theory and the ghosts of cultural analysis overlap. The dynamic of haunting not only enables those living in the present to become aware of histories that have been erased by dominant historical narratives, but also potentially signifies the unrepresentable moment of trauma, be it trauma of an individual’s experience of terror or the collective trauma of genocide or slavery.6

Articulated this way, the spectral form not only acts as a medium opening the present up to the past or culture up to trauma, it also conjoins the collective to the individual in a manner which suggests that the denial of our spectral self/past is in a certain sense necessary to the reproduction of identity. As such, our understanding of ourselves, and all that exists around that understanding is predicated as much upon what is forgotten and unseen as what is remembered and seen. Consequently the act of un-remembrance

6 Erica L. Johnson, “Giving Up The Ghost: National And Literary Haunting in Orlando,” Modern Fiction Studies 50 (Spring 2004): 110. 116 harbours within it a remembrance of things lost; those fragments of misplaced memories which pull at us in such a way so as to both intrigue and disturb.

Driven by these competing desires, we are simultaneously haunted by the need to recover these hidden pasts and haunted by the impossibility of the very task; and no matter how much we try to excavate and reveal that which is un-remembered, the gap between the unknown and the unknown refuses to close. Yet as impossible as this endeavour may be, the politics of this task require us to try, not in order to discover the Truth but to give those who have been displaced a voice, and to recover (however imperfectly) those parts of ourselves which have also been marginalised. As Kathleen Brogan writes in American Stories of Cultural Haunting: Tales of Heirs and Ethnographers, “stories of cultural haunting have everything to do with cultural transformation engendered by immigration, as well as by those involuntary and violent movements of people that have rendered inextricable our sense of national identity and national guilt.”7 In the context of Australia, one of the convict spectre’s key functions is to facilitate the unpacking of the dominant historical narrative and to provide a means of talking of the physical and psychological trauma that is associated with the exile and transportation of the convicts to Australia. In this way, in order to unpack the conflation of convict identity with the monstrous and the spectral, it is necessary to address Gothic literature itself.

Within the field of Gothic literature the ghost has its own narrative history that situates it along side such archetypal forms as Frankenstein’s Monster, Dracula, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and the werewolf. Though only the Monster and Jekyll/Hyde are unique inventions of Gothic literature, what they are all driven by is a dynamic sense of loss. Located within a range of obsessive, compulsive behaviours, the laws and rules governing their existence seemingly traps each of them in a codified mantra of repetition, denial and trauma. As Subject to their Object, the audience’s anxiety

7 Kathleen Brogan, “American Stories of Cultural Haunting: Tales of Heirs and Ethnographers,” Collage English 57, no.2 (Feb 1995): 158, http://www.jstore.org/stable/378807.

117 concerning each of these Gothic creations is related to a fear of contamination of the deadly infectious power of the Other.

Yet the historically mediated re-imaging of these characters from the 18th Century to today has perhaps engendered another mode of social anxiety, one that spills out from the very repetition of the fictional rules that govern the existence of these characters. For what this repetition does is wear away at these self-same rules, their very frequency recalibrating the auratic meaning located around their cultural representation. Consequently, such has been the repetition of these tropes that we the audience are today full to bursting with them. In fact so thin have they been worn it begs the question; what if these Gothic creatures found a way to somehow navigate beyond the compulsive and the repetitious; to strike out for a different horizon, break out from the arcane and redundant laws that have shackled both ourselves and them? Perhaps this then is particular to us and our time, this anxiety that the Other is on the move. Unburdened by our obsessive desire for repetition it has decided to communicate all too clearly everything we have desperately tried to disavow. Or perhaps worse still, simply turn around and walk away, leaving us alone with our neurotic preoccupations.

3.2 - Benjamin’s ghost

This invocation of the auratic properties of the Other as Gothic monster calls forth the spectre of Walter Benjamin and his multifaceted understanding of this term. In terms of visual culture and the representation of identity two distinct directions subsequently manifest themselves within Benjamin’s explication of auratic force. The first direction as located in the 1936 essay “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical

Reproduction,” speaks to an auratic condition that in the 19th century is “withering” away.8 Benjamin addresses this degradation of aura through the relationship between works of art (such as painting) and the visual technologies (such as photography and

8 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Ardent, trans. Harry Zohn (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1955; New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 221. Citations refer to Schocken edition.

118 film), whose properties of reproduction consequently seemed to undermine the notion of specificity and authenticity which had previously underpinned the aura of meaning located around artworks.

While Benjamin frames this degradation of auratic force within the context of art, the underlying thesis to this essay is that the processes of reproduction and repetition driving industrialisation shall have a similar impact upon all aspects of Modernity. This articulation of aura then corresponds to the ontological condition of the contemporary Gothic monster, whose historical repetition has similarly undermined the aura of originality and difference that once empowered their creation. Yet, as I’ve suggested, the Gothic and its monsters are on the move, freed at least in part by this process of repetition. In this way, the generation of movement and of agency through repetition, points to the second direction Benjamin assigns to auratic force, namely that of empowerment or regeneration.

Read this way a type of paradoxical exchange is taking place where by the force of industrial/cultural repetition is simultaneously wearing down one form of auratic authority while at the same time generating another. Thus where Benjamin addresses the former mode of aura in his “The Work of Art” essay, the latter mode of aura is located within essays such as “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire”, and the monumental Arcades Project. In these texts the potential for a retrieved or recalibrated aura is situated not within the fold of originality but rather within its opposite, the fractured repetition of the gaze itself. In the essay “Benjamin’s Aura”, film scholar, and cultural theorist, Miriam Bratu Hansen argues that Benjamin’s notion of the aura is structured around a fundamental contradiction between decline and renewal. As Hansen writes:

Aura not only named the most precious facet among other types of experience he described as irrevocably in decline, to be grasped only through their historical erosion. Aura’s epistemic structure secularized and modernized … can also be seen at work in Benjamin’s efforts to reconceptualize experience through the very conditions of its impossibility.9

9 Miriam Bratu Hansen, “Benjamin’s Aura,” Critical Inquiry 34, no. 2 (Winter 2008): 338.

119 The tension generated between these two positions subsequently points to the broader political violence Benjamin regarded as commensurate with the fracturing of auratic representation.

For Benjamin this fracturing of the aura has led to not only a crisis of representation but also a crisis of meaning that haunts Modernity’s entire European experience. In this context, the trauma, rupture and uncertainty which mark out Benjamin’s crisis of reproduction, are the same qualities that inform the rise of Gothic Literature in the 18th Century and the establishment of a penal colony in Australia. Gothic literature and Australia’s penal enterprise share with Benjamin’s auratic materiality a preoccupation with loss, repetition and origins that productively resonates around those drives and impulses which lie beneath the rational.

Benjamin’s interaction with the Gothic is of central importance to any understanding of the politics located within his cultural analysis of experience. As Margaret Cohen argues in Profane Illuminations: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution, endemic to Benjamin’s work is a type of Gothic Marxism which is “fascinated with the irrational aspects of social process … [investigating] how the irrational pervades existing society and dreams of using it to effect social change.”10 Benjamin thus draws upon a Gothic aesthetic in order to disrupt and reconstruct the essentialist meta-narrative structure traditionally associated with Marx’s analysis of capitalism. One of Benjamin’s ongoing preoccupations is to liberate Marxism from its own economic determinism. In the process Benjamin’s recourse to a Gothic aesthetic seeks to incorporate the political mechanisms of labour, capital and production with the private intimacy of the material imagination, where the affective plane of experience and sensation speaks to the open-ended ambiguity of performance.

In both Walter Benjamin’s work as well as the broader field of Gothic literature, ambiguity both materially and performativity carries with it a political dimension that

10 Margaret Cohan, Profane Illuminations: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1-2. 120 seeks to map out and interrogate the discursive formation of hegemonic authority. To that end the production of linguistic/cultural ambiguity through the fracturing of signification is harnessed as a means of disrupting the closed binary between Subject and Object or Self and Other. Consequently this aesthetic of fractured displacement generates within Gothic literature, Benjamin’s work and my own practice, a form of productive mourning in which the discarded ruin and the loss situated around such ruins resonates both as an end point and a beginning point and as a marker for what has been lost. However, it is through that loss that the potential for a type of renewal or becoming is uncovered.

As Benjamin argues in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, within the space of Baroque theatre resides a mode of counter signification which utilises the melancholic fragment as allegory to disrupt the naturalisation of meaning/history. In this sense the mise-en-scène of the Baroque Trauerspiel or mourning play is marked by an overloaded surplus of objects and images often related to death or decay, such as the corpse and the death head. As Benjamin writes:

That which lies here in ruins, the highly significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact the finest material in baroque creation. For it is common practice in the literature of the baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any strict idea of a goal, and in the unremitting expectation of a miracle, to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification.11

For Benjamin these objects of loss in conjunction with their discontinuity to each other generates a melancholic exchange or gaze, in which the referential meaning between object and idea becomes detached and transformed into a mosaic of disparate images. Subsequently history and language, object and idea are re-configured within the allegorical ruin of the dismembered melancholic body.

3.3 - The man next door: Juan Davila

In the context of contemporary Australian art, the trauma associated with our colonial heritage and its attendant concerns with convict history, national identity and

11 Benjamin, The Origin of German, 178. 121 masculinity, brings my practice into contact with the artist Juan Davila. Born in Chile in 1946 and moving to Australia in 1974, Davila’s trans-cultural experiences inform an art practice that explores the politics of peripheral representation as it relates to gender, sexuality, desire, history, geography, race and aesthetics. In particular, Davila’s work is concerned with the mechanisms of power, authority and violence that develop out of the interaction between centre and periphery. As such, Davila uses the micro or personal form of the figure to speak to the metadiscourses of political authority.

Working across a range of approaches that include painting, printmaking and installation, Davila’s practice is primarily constructed around a figurative approach that in tone draws upon the aesthetic traditions of expressionism, pop art, surrealism and magic or hyper-realism. At the same time intersecting through these aesthetic modalities are a number of vernacular elements related to pornography, comic strips and his South American heritage. Davila uses the appropriated image as a means of corralling together his disparate ideas. Appropriation, as it registers in Davila’s practice and particularly in his work from the late 1970s to the mid 1990s, involves the self-conscious visual referencing of iconic images, people and historical moments, juxtaposed together. This use of appropriation is a hallmark of first wave postmodernist art and situates Davila’s practice alongside Australian artists such as Maria Kozic and Imants Tillers, both of whom used the mediated image to unpack the politics of representation. For artists such as Juan Davila, postmodernism was used to re-imagine the aesthetic interaction between copy and original and to critique the political interaction between centre and periphery. Thus the first wave of Postmodernism seemed to provide a language for marginalised cultures such as Australia and Chile to address Modernism’s articulation of authority, power and identity.

Within the oeuvre of Davila’s work, one of his most iconic paintings that deals with Australia’s marginalised identity is Fable of Australian Painting (Figure 7). Completed in 1983, Fable of Australian Painting is constructed through the use of appropriated imagery, sourced primarily from Australian artists such as Albert Tucker, Sidney Nolan, William Dobell and interspersed with a few international references 122 such as Tom of Finland, Cristo and Mark Rothko. Davila’s use of appropriation during this period can be likened to the allegorical form of the historical ruin which Benjamin locates in Baroque theatre and expresses in the guise of the dismembered body, whose various parts, the torso, head and limbs where often strewn across the stage.

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS

Figure 7. Juan Davila, Fable of Australian Painting, 1983. Detail. Oil on canvas, 274 x 1096 cm. Museum of Contemporary Art, JW Power Bequest.

In this sense Fable of Australian Painting can be read as a type of neo-Baroque stage upon which Davila has scattered the partially-exhumed remains of various artistic endeavors. Viewed this way, the stage that is Fable of Australian Painting is made up of a series of fragmented figural offerings and exchanges structured across four sections. In the first section, Davila depicts the figure of Tom of Finland hugging a tree, while on the right hand side stands what looks like a painter imagined in the form of one of Albert Tucker’s creations. The second section is occupied by the figures of John Brack on the left and Nolan’s Ned Kelly on the right, while the third section is made up of an appropriated Russell Drysdale figure standing alongside a creature inspired by Arthur Boyd. In the final section, Davila presents us with an appropriated William Dobell

123 figure on the left and on the right a nondescript form wearing what appears to be a Ron Robertson-Swann crown.

Occupying a shallow depth of field, the appropriated forms in Davila’s painting, like Benjamin’s allegorical ruins, are juxtaposed against each other and the ground of the painting as a means of disrupting both the homogenous reproduction of hegemonic authority and the related reification of European Australia’s cultural and spatial identity. In this sense Davila’s fragmentation of space, like Benjamin’s fragmentation of the allegorical body, points to the fracturing of nature itself, which in its allegorical form acts to extinguish the illusion of totality.12 This process not only interrogates the illusion of State hegemony but also extends to the illusion of a unified subject.

In the context of Fable of Australian Painting, Davila’s use of a condensed picture plane conveys not only the cultural disjuncture that runs through the European Australian imagination, but also evokes a landscape stringently resistant to occupation. The figures in Davila’s painting convey an affective separation between each other and the landscape, a gap between figure and ground, which, as in Sally Smart’s Shadow Farm resonates as a type of dislocated/ruptured psyche within the European experience of the Australian environment. This is a dislocation that in turn spills over into the construction of our cultural and national identity. For Davila, this gap between place and identity in Australia points to the manner in which:

Australian painting has had a long tradition of dependency and of repetition- European and now the American models. This has produced a barren mainstream Australian art, a soulless product that reeks of money, not ideas. The first encounter of Europe with Australia still operates in our imagination as a censorship of what this place can become… We also have the lingering unconscious of the colonisers at play. The coincidence between the imperial ideology and the present economic rationalism has produced a lineal visual representation as our art history, a sort of comic strip.13

12 Ibid., 176.

13 Juan Davila, “Fable of Australian Painting,” in Juan Davila, Artist Statement (Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press, in association with Museum of Contemporary Art, 2006), 97. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name. 124 Australian identity is thus structured around a type of historical bind in which both coloniser and colonised, from a European perspective, are seen as marginal entities. For Davila it is almost as if the territorial notion of terra nullius14 has mutated into a type of recurring cultural tabula rasa. Consequently and within a local context, Australia’s European cultural production is structured around a form of un-remembrance, a celebration of cultural forgetting that permits European Australian artists to re-colonise the Indigenous aesthetic experience. At the same time, the international perspective considers this peripheral expression of European culture as an empty site devoid of any significant meaning or presence. In this regard Davila’s practice forcefully articulates the cultural alienation that is both internally and externally visited upon a variety of different peripheral bodies.

Yet within the dynamism of Davila’s work, a quality of personal loss runs through his practice, creating a quality of despair that is arguably generated through a type of binary reverb which washes back over his own work. In effect, Davila’s critique of hegemonic authority becomes entangled in the very binary language it seeks to disrupt, and as a result Davila’s practice is seemingly trapped within the same cultural bind that continues to ensnare Australia’s European cultural imagination. As Dr Heather Barker and Professor Charles Green argue in the journal article No More Provincialism: Art &Text, for Paul Taylor and artists such as Davila, the development of cultural globalisation critically undermined Australia’s peripheral project, and as a consequence “it was obvious by the later 1980s that the attempt to convince international audiences that Australian art was authentically unauthentic had failed.”15 However, these political and semiotic entanglements don’t diminish Davila’s insights into the fault lines running through the re/production of Australia’s national identity; rather they point to the limitations located within a negative articulation of mimetic simulacra.

14 Meaning ‘unoccupied land’. A term that was used in Australia to dispose the Indigenous popula- tion of any legal or political rights

15 Heather Barker and Charles Green, “No More Provincialism: Art & Text,” emaj, no. 5 (2010): 23, http://www.melbourneartjournal.unimelb.edu.au/E-MAJ. 125 Dr Barker and Professor Green’s assertion that Australia’s politics of peripheral representation were neutralised through the relentless expansion of globalisation, only tells part of the story.16 It is certainly true that globalisation has helped to sustain the existing cultural hegemony within an US/European axis; however Australia’s play for peripheral significance was in effect lost from the moment this mode of representation was located within a negative framework. From its inception as a penal colony, European Australia has constructed its identity from within the binary of original and copy and it is this negative articulation of itself more than anything else which has arguably permitted Australia to cede its peripheral power. The significance of Australia’s peripheral position in the 1980s had actually failed before it began because its central proposition, Australia’s unauthentic authentic condition, was simply the continuance of a two hundred year-old narrative of cultural lack and unoriginality.

However if this is the historical condition of Australia’s political/national identity, the question arises, just how do Australian artists and the broader culture escape from this binary fate? In one sense, while Europe and the US continue resolutely to hold onto this binary mechanism, the prospect of such an escape seems remote. Yet in another sense, a possible line of escape does exist through the Benjaminian excavation of the dead and the displaced. In other words, Benjamin’s entire project can be read as a methodological performance in which the marginalised past is constantly re-examined and opened up in order to resist the despotic triumph of homogenous time. As Benjamin writes:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm.17

16 Ibid., 24.

17 Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy,” 257.

126 Subsequently, for Benjamin the role of art and philosophy is to do battle with the hegemonic present, to refuse to cede the historical materiality of the past and, in effect, to refuse to agree to a binary articulation of history in which the oppressed and the marginalised are trapped within a plane of negative signification. Thus for Benjamin the process of talking back to the dead, of refusing to give the lost and the marginalised over to the despotic present, is a deeply political act that can be read as a sustained critique upon the politics of negative representation.

In the context of Davila’s practice, Benjamin’s call to arms in the excavation of marginalised identity is particularly resonant around the politics of sexuality, homosexuality and masculinity. Sex and sexuality almost from the beginning of Davila’s career have been a central preoccupation, one in which homosexuality during the 1980s-1990s became an increasingly predominant motif. Dispersed across Davila’s work, the representation of homosexuality is located in the first instance through the recurring figure of Tom of Finland. Secondly, its presence is conveyed through specific images of homosexual interaction and sexual intercourse, and thirdly via the ongoing depiction of the penis itself. In this context, the reproduction of homosexuality in Davila’s work functions not only as a celebration of sexuality, identity and experience, but also as a means of critically regaling the destructive pretensions of Australia’s insular and provincial middle class. Thus, while Davila’s representation of masculinity through homosexuality appears to differ markedly from both that of my own and Adam Cullen’s, when looked at closer all three of us deploy the transgressive force of masculine sexuality to critique the ideological inscription of patriarchal authority across the male body.

Each artist’s practice foregrounds a form of hysterical heterosexual masculinity, an excessive libidinal force that is desperate, fractured and alienated in the context of the Australian environment. The men in Fable of Australian Painting seem out of sync with the landscape, not quite in the right time or place; their displacement subsequently folding back around to the question of gender and to the question of their

127 masculinity. Their displacement from the Australian landscape is in effect a type of spectral displacement from their own heterosexual masculinity. What we see in Davila’s depiction of Tom of Finland, and the Tucker, Ned Kelly, Dobell and Brack figures, is a flattened, disjointed expression of Australian masculine identity that is simultaneously in search of, but lost to meaning in the mythological field of origin and place from which identity spills. Read this way, the figures in Fable of Australian Painting are located in a constellation of fragmented possibilities in which the ruins of their peripheral masculinity unfold both productively and unproductively across an Australian landscape overrun with the spectral remains of Australia’s convict past.

3.4 - Convict Vagabonds

In relation to my own practice, the productive possibilities of Australia’s convict masculinity are accessed through the intersection between materiality, media and representation. Of these elements, one of the most valuable concerns is the absurd/ comic tone of my work. As touched upon in the previous chapter, this carnivalesque/ comic humour is one that, like Adam Cullen, I utilise in my work to problematise the hegemonic representation of Australian masculinity. In the photomontage series The Day Of The Convict Vagabonds this sense of the absurd is initially grounded through the indexical theatricality associated with the figure of a person (myself) dressed up wearing a skull mask or a Mexican-inspired Lucha Libre mask, with a vampire cape, a green Hulk torso and a pair of Adidas tracksuit pants. The absurd theatricality associated with this mongrelised costume is enhanced further through the incongruous juxtaposition between the figure and his surrounding environment, which varies from the Tasmanian bush in some photos to domestic interiors in others.

These Gothic tropes, along with series title, The Day of the Convict Vagabonds, evoke an exaggeratedly camp aesthetic associated with B-grade horror/science fiction films of the 1950s and1960s such as The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) and Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959). This combination of elements establishes a sense of play; an order of the ludicrous that sets the tone for

128 this series. In this series the convict vagabond’s theatricality, as conveyed through the cheap commercial materiality of his outfit, points to both the constructed formulation of Australian masculine identity and the exaggerated hysteria ceaselessly cycling through that formulation. Thus coded within the comic exaggeration of his pose is an intense anxiety associated with the heterogenic properties of role-play located within the performance of gender and masculinity. In Scene 3 of The Day of the Convict Vagabonds (Figure 8), the tension that resides between these two positions is comically explored through an image of a convict monster staring down into a still pool of water. In this scene the convict vagabond with arms raised in the air, scans the water with a laser beam emanating from his eyes. The vagabond, this time wearing a Mexican wrestling Lucha Libre mask looks down into a pool in a moment that parallels the Ancient Greek myth of Narcissus.

Figure 8. Shannon Field, The Day of the Convict Vagabonds Scene 3, 2012. Photo-media, 59x 84cm. Property of the artist.

In this myth the figure of Narcissus becomes so obsessed by his own reflection that he is unable to leave it and subsequently dies. While the fable is popularly understood as a cautionary tale and a warning against excessive (male) vanity, when considered ideologically it might be regarded as a diagrammatic representation of the

129 process of symbolic integration. The Subject, in order to see their symbolic self and thus become encoded within the ideological chain of signification, must give themselves over to the spectacle of the symbolic. The aura of the Subject’s image must disappear into their own representation. Yet the temporal marginality of European Australian identity, points to a fragile exchange between the landscape, gaze and self.

For art critic Paul Foss this exchange foregrounds our continued, if flawed, desire to find ourselves in the landscape. In the essay “Landscape Without Landscape: Prefatory Remarks,” Foss writes that, “the general impulse is to recede into the background of this country seemingly carved out of a wilderness, as if by narcissistic identification. Thus ‘man’ looks for a landscape/face who resembles himself and whom he may love (or not, as is often the case) as his ‘motherland’ loved him.”18 Foss’s remark highlights the ongoing psychological struggle within the European Australian mind between identification, landscape and the mother country; a struggle in which our national gaze continues to turn outwards looking for some form of external cultural approval. However what happens if there is no ‘motherland’ love to begin with? That is what happens, as with the convicts in Australia, if this experience relates directly to a lack of ‘motherland’ love, a traumatic lack that the convict subject is unable to reconcile with his/their continued desire for social integration.

Therefore, the spectacle of transportation to Australia, the exiling of the convict form to the other side of the world both symbolically and physically embodies an irrevocable withdrawal of sovereign love, a denial of political legitimacy, which in effect accords them no corporal representation. Consequently it is the spectral form of convict loss that is the event horizon within my practice. The traumatic force associated with the banishment of the convict body to Australia and the attendant demarcation of convict masculinity as failed and monstrous is the originating moment of misappropriation

18 Paul Foss, “Landscape Without Landscape: Prefatory Remarks,” in Island in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Culture, ed. Paul Foss (Sydney: Pluto Press, Sydney, 1988), 3.

130 which lies embedded within Australia’s national psyche. The trauma of Australian national identity, and with it, the trauma of Australian masculinity, is related to our inability to reconcile the genesis narrative of Australia’s European convict beginning with either our personal narratives of self, or our collective narratives of place and landscape.

Paradoxically though, it is precisely through these same incompatibilities that Australia’s deviant convict masculinity offers up an array of monstrous possibilities. In the context of The Day of the Convict Vagabonds, this sense of divergent possibilities in which masculinity might reconfigure back into or away from the hegemonic norm is addressed through the use of montage and exaggerated pixilation. Both these elements disrupt a homogenous reading of the image, by intruding into the representational plane that marks out the work. In a Benjaminian sense the fragment or monad is used to displace the triumph of homogenous empty time. Benjamin locates this rupturing of empty time around what he describes as a “heightened graphicness”. As he writes, “the first stage in this undertaking will be to carry over the principle of montage into history. That is, to assemble large-scale constructions out of the smallest and most precise cut components. Indeed, to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event. And, therefore, to break with vulgar historical naturalism.”19 My use of pixilated photomontages thus speaks to a constellation of possible Australian masculinities. In Scene 3 a large square of green and a smaller area of brown card float across the surface. Consequently, these areas of colour in their apparent deviation from the semiotic field of the photomontage push against the representational homogeneity of the photographic ground.

This excessive pixilation gives a mosaic quality to the photomontages, highlighting the multitude of particles that constitute the subject. This has the effect of breaching our monocle gaze, and in the process rupturing the seamless linguistic membrane which coats the ideological inscription of representation. Read this way

19 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 461. 131 my work permits the ruin of the convict fragment to return to the present, in this process generating a multitude of becomings out of which both positive and negative articulations of Australian heterosexual masculinity might be imagined.

3.5 - Boys don’t cry

The representation of the convict form within The Boys generates a quality of spectral becoming that is similarly located within Day of The Convict Vagabonds as well as in Davila’s Fable of Australian Painting. Brett’s haunted presence, like one of Davila’s appropriated fragments or my pixelated vagabonds, points not only to the construction of masculine identity but also the construction of Australia’s national identity. This fractured juxtaposition of historical elements makes it possible to connect him with the two Alexander Pearces; that is the historical Alexander Pearce and the fictional/filmic Pearce. Linked by their convict heritage, Brett not only mirrors Pearce, but also in a spectral sense embodies the ghost of Pearce and his convict life. In this sense Brett’s spectral form along with the other fragments of Australia’s convict history lie strewn across the stage of our own national mourning play. The linear articulation of history is disrupted by exploding, as Benjamin puts it “the homogeneity of the epoch, interspersing it with ruins – that is, with the present.”20 Consequently this re-animation of the spectre of Pearce inside of Brett situates both past and present within the same constellation; thereby providing a stage in which Australia’s convict history continues to actively engage with, and exist beside, Australia’s social present.

However, like Davila’s fragmented appropriation, Brett Sprague’s spectral form speaks not only to questions of national history but also to questions of gender and in particular the unstable reproduction of heterosexual masculinity in Australia today. As art/cultural critic Andrew Frost writes in The Boys, “deprived of real power or influence, emasculated not only by women but also by other men, Brett’s ambitions have no grounding in real life.”21 In this way Brett personifies the manner in which the

20 Ibid., 474.

21 Andrew Frost, The Boys, Australian Screen Classics (Sydney: Currency Press, 2010), 52. 132 male subject is haunted by, and in turn haunts, the performance and construction of heterosexual masculinity. From the moment Brett rejoins his family he emanates a sense of volatile, simmering rage. He cajoles, berates and belittles everyone in the family including his mother, his brothers and his girlfriend, and behind every sarcastic remark and every knowing look the threat of physical violence is palpable.

His performance however is driven by a sense of desperation, for lurking behind Brett’s hyper-aggression, haunting his violent articulation of heterosexual masculinity is his fear of social and sexual impotency. This is a fear Brett’s girlfriend Michelle picks up on when she says, “I don’t know what they did to you while you were in there, Brett, but I don’t think you’ve got it in you. {In fact, from what I’ve seen so far, I’d have to say you’re all talk and no action.}”22 Michelle is clearly insinuating with this comment that Brett is either sexually impotent or gay, both of which suggest a type of social fragility and an inadequacy that is aimed directly at his performance of heterosexual masculinity. Brett attempts to brush Michelle’s innuendo aside, yet when we first see Brett leaving the prison, the camera momentarily focuses past him to a man, a prisoner gazing intently through the wire fence at Brett. While this look is ambiguous and fleeting, it nevertheless conveys the possibility of a homosexual relationship. Certainly there is some importance, some bond that this moment evokes, which Brett is unable to reconcile himself to outside the prison. Although the look only lasts a moment, when read in the context of Brett’s later problematic sexual behaviour, it is loaded with ominous meaning.

Brett resists Michelle’s sexual disparagement and yet his physical impotency with her suggests that something did indeed happen during his time in prison. However, although Brett is unable to countenance the questioning of his sexual potency, he does understand all too clearly the social and political marginalisation experienced by himself and his whole family. It is a situation he alludes to when in an argument with his brother Glenn. Brett says, “What fuckin’ future, Glenn? This is it; this is the fuckin’ future! You

22 Stephen Sewell, The Boys, directed by Rowan Woods, screenplay, scene 51(Sydney: Currency Press, 1998), 42. 133 think you’re ever going to get out of here? You think some rich bastard is going to reach out and plop you down in one of those places you see on TV? Is that what you think?”23 A few lines later, Brett’s answer to their social predicament is to “do to them what they’re doing to us”. Just exactly who ‘they’ are is never spelt out, but it is reasonable to infer that ‘they’ is directed towards everyone else, particularly people in authority such as the police, the judiciary, politicians, people with wealth and position, people of different sexual orientation and, in a sexual context, women in general. At the same time while it is unclear precisely what Brett means when he declares that they have to “do it to them”, the subtext to this declaration is one of desperate action, that the only way to reclaim something of this world for themselves is through violence.

However what Brett is unable to grasp is the degree to which his sense of marginalisation relates to a mode of masculinity that is constructed around both specific patriarchal considerations as well as the ongoing impact of Australia’s founding moment. Social class certainly does play a part in the Sprague family’s disenfranchisement and Brett’s particular frustration and impotency. The film shows quite clearly that the Sprague family lives in one of the poorer, outer-western suburbs of Sydney. Their mother struggles to make ends meet as a seamstress, while the brothers primarily survive on the dole. The house itself looks worn out, while the objects inside such as the TV, fridge and oven are all cheap and run-down. In this way Brett Sprague and indeed the whole Sprague family, encompass a type of class spectre.

As with Brett’s other ghostly incarnations, the spectre of class incorporates Freud’s notion of the uncanny. For Freud, the uncanny “is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old - established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”24 In this way the uncanny might be described as that order of the familiar and known that returns to us

23 Ibid., 62.

24 Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works Of Sigmund Freud, An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, vol 17(1917-1919), trans James Strachey (1955; repr., London: The Hogarth Press, 1999), 241. Citations are to the 1999 edition. 134 as the unfamiliar and unknown. In relation to class, Brett’s spectre points to the manner in which the poor haunt the broader political consciousness. That is, as much as the broader body politic attempts to geographically marginalise and deny the existence of the corpus of its citizenry; they continue to spill over from the periphery of the symbolic into the realm of the social real. This group’s economic and social dislocation engineers a type of moral transmogrification that produces an uncanny effect; that is, they may look like us but they are not us, they are different, dysfunctional and monstrous. In other words they are familiar yet unfamiliar, known and unknown; in this way an uncanny dynamic is activated around the performance of class.

Yet, the question of moral failure that underscores this uncanny relationship can be reversed as this failure or dysfunction is not located within the individual, but instead resides within the state. Possibly one of the most disturbing things about Brett Sprague and his family, and what generates social unease about people who live near or below the poverty line, is that they point to those aspects of the capitalistic enterprise that do not work. In doing this they disrupt the industrial utopian fantasy that lies at the heart of capitalism, a fantasy which suggests that we can all be economic equals, that everything can be provided for and growth is unlimited. As such when we interact with the economically disenfranchised we are haunted by an uncanny moment in which our familiar conception of the capitalist enterprise, with all its notions of success, growth and inclusiveness, is confronted by our dissociation or repression of the inherent failings of this same project - with all its attendant contradictions, limits and violence.

Thus while the spectre is a useful tool for investigating questions of marginalisation, neither the spectre nor the subject occupy positions of complete disempowerment. If anything, what the spectre demonstrates is that the Other not only has the potential to generate change but is, in itself, a site of empowered force. Marginalisation then is a contextual experience, in which the performance and articulation of agency expands and contracts in relation to an array of social and political interactions between the subject and their environment. As such, the experience

135 of marginalisation parallels the absent/present materiality that marks out the spectral form. In this sense the convict spectre of Brett Sprague evokes both the presence of a linguistic blockage that is knotted around the subject and the spectral force of absence that permits the subject to navigate around and through these same impediments.

In terms of The Boys this reading of the spectral enables the Sprague family to be viewed beyond the confines of class; in this way they are more than the accumulated markers of disempowerment. Certainly in relation to masculinity, the brothers’ behaviour needs to be explored beyond a framework of circumscribed economic/class considerations. As such it is my contention that what the Spragues illustrate is not so much an aberrant model of working class masculinity, but instead the embedded dynamic at play between all heterosexual masculine subjects and patriarchy’s ideological propositions. The brothers’ spectral nature subsequently acts as a hinge linking both individual and state together and thereby opening up a series of questions related to alterity, power, complicity, violence and identity.

Looking then at the Sprague brothers it becomes apparent that their emblematic representation of heterosexual masculinity and its violent relationship to patriarchy points to a heterosexual male subject who is haunted by the spectre that is himself; a ghost or phantom desperately trying to disguise his inability to totally embody a heterosexual masculine position. However this act of repression is arguably always in the process of returning; consequently the anxiety, fear and frustration attendant with this knowledge spills out into various different forms of social violence. What becomes apparent in The Boys is the manner in which both patriarchy as well as the apparatus of patriarchal reproduction is analogous to aspects of the phantom and the phantasmagoria. In this way it is not just Brett Sprague (and through him all heterosexual male subjects) who are spectres, but patriarchy itself which is spectral. Transcending time and space, disembodied, and amphoral, patriarchy is perhaps the spectre par excellence; however, while patriarchy haunts Brett Sprague and his brothers there is no single patriarchal spectre or patriarchal mind we can point to.

136 Patriarchy then functions like a piece of emblematic code that is embedded in larger interconnected modules of cultural representation; simultaneously there but not there, the presence of these patriarchal monads is only felt as a trace, a haunting that reappears through the processes of discursive mimesis. Read this way, the ideological interaction between patriarchy and masculinity is a product not only of certain historic/ material conditions but also relates equally to specific psychological factors that interact between subject and nation. The significance we consequently attach to the nation state suggests a surplus of emotional investment, which calls to mind the notion of suture. For cultural theorist Stuart Hall, suture relates to the manner in which identity is formulated through the subject, being simultaneously stitched into and investing in various ideological propositions.25 The flow of meanings which intersect through the subject also flow through the nation, and as such the cultural/political discourses that suture the subject to the nation, in turn, suture the nation to the subject.

The construction of a national consciousness requires a form of collective projection by the constituent subjects onto a plain of imagination, fantasy and desire. What resides within this plain is the ghostly re-inscription of ourselves; the materialisation of both subject and nation in a co-dependant process situated in the fold of the imaginary. While the nation is socially constructed, the process of projection and transference between subject and state suggests that the nation always carries with it a trace of both the ideological process of this exchange as well as the psychological mechanisms particular to the subject. In looking to address this exchange between individual and nation the spectral properties associated with the projection/ construction of national identity and national memory overlap epistemologically with the development of phantasmagoric modes of entertainment.

25 Stuart Hall, “Who Needs ‘identity’?” in Identity: A Reader, ed. Paul du Gay, Jessica Evans and Peter Redman (London: SAGE publications, 2000), 19.

137 3.6 - Machine dreams

The term phantasmagoria historically refers to a type of exhibition or show in which ghostly forms materialised and moved around a stage. Developed around the late eighteenth-century, these shows combined the optical technologies of lanterns, mirrors and projectors with photographs, transparencies or drawings to create various types of ghostly apparitions. As the phantasmagoria developed over time, other elements including smoke, music and actors were introduced to increase the gothic atmosphere attendant to the proceedings. Highly successful across Europe, particularly in France and Britain, the phantasmagoria as a cultural and technological experience was intimately attuned to the desire on the part of the audience to see real ghosts.

This desire to witness and experience the spectral within the historical context of the phantasmagoria points to the manner in which epistemological contradictions have inhabited the process of European Modernity from its inception. As Terry Castle argues, the phantasmagoria’s incorporation of scientific technologies with subjective fantasy and desire highlights the rational and the irrational forces located within the enlightenment. As Castle writes:

The word phantasmagoria, like the magic lantern itself, inevitably carried with it powerful atavistic associations with magic and the supernatural. To invoke the supposedly mechanistic analogy was subliminally to import the language of the uncanny into the realm of mental function. The mind became a phantom-zone – given over, at least potentially, to spectral presences and haunting obsessions ... not so surprisingly, the original technological meaning of the term seemed to drop away altogether ... [As such] ... by the end of the nineteenth century, ghosts had disappeared from everyday life, but ... human experience had become more ghost-ridden than ever. Through a strange process of rhetorical displacement, thought itself had become phantasmagorical.26

This rhetorical displacement, the “spectralization or ghostifying of mental space”27 consequently provides an opening through which the metaphoric parallels between ideology and the phantasmagoria can be addressed. In this way the phantasmagoria

26 Terry Castle, “Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (Autumn, 1988): 30¬-31, http://www.jstore.org/stable/1343603.

27 Ibid., 29. 138 highlights the manner in which ideology is driven by fantasy and desire; that the whole process of becoming is predicated upon irrational psychological mechanisms that are constantly at play within the subject. Thus the spectral points to not only the irrational properties inherent within the subject but also our desire to engage with the spectral unknown residing beyond consciousness; to escape, if only momentarily, the restrictive regimes of logic we construct, impose and submit to on a daily bases. Ideology then like the phantasmagoria manifests both conscious and unconscious mechanisms that could be described as a form of dream work. It is a proposition that returns us to the work of

Walter Benjamin and in particular his seminal text, The Arcades Project.

In The Arcades Project, the phantasmagoria is one of the key mechanisms Benjamin utilises as a mode of cultural critique. In the broadest sense Benjamin sees the phantasmagorical as a means of both describing and experiencing Modernity. As he writes:

Our investigation proposes to show how, as a consequence of this reifying representation of civilization, the new forms of behaviour and the new economically and technologically based creations that we owe to the nineteenth century enter the universe of a phantasmagoria. These creations undergo this ‘illumination’ not only in a theoretical manner, by an ideological transposition, but also in the immediacy of their perceptible presence. They are manifest as phantasmagorias.28

Thus for Benjamin the spectral properties of the phantasmagoria act as a master trope or key with which to unlock the multiple array of effects realised through the interaction between industrialisation and the individual. Benjamin turns to the phantasmagorical because in the phantom dream work of fantasy and desire he is able to not only trace the haunted liminal properties which mark out the exchange between capitalism and self, but also to explore the material performance of this exchange, that is the lived interiority of capitalism. In this way Benjamin confronts the ambiguous and contradictory qualities present in modern life, addressing through the phantasmagorical experience both the creative pleasures and destructive implications located within capitalism and ourselves.

28 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 14.

139 In The Arcades Project Benjamin situates the dream world of the phantasmagoria around a series of experiences/technologies that include, to name just a few, the development of the arcades in Paris, the Flaneur, photography, mechanical reproduction, fashion, history and the industrial construction of iron. Structured like snapshots, or fragments, Benjamin utilises these individual moments in The Arcades Project as a form of methodological critique designed to rupture or blast homogenous expressions of thought, time and power.

The experience of reading the text, with its juxtaposition of images and ideas is a performative experience which evokes a multitude of intersecting movements; of moving in and out of a memory, of the past and the present moving within a single constellation, of the movement of the flaneur through the street, the movement of the camera, the movement of the aura, and the movement of the gaze. Within each of these moments Benjamin conveys a double movement, a spectral sense of presence and absence, which not only speaks to the haunted interaction between subject, object and memory, but also generates a mode of critique aimed directly at all forms of hegemonic expression. As cultural theorist Ian Chambers writes:

It is the history of the ‘untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful’, that is, in the discontinued, discarded and dispersed histories of the vanquished, that Benjamin continually sought to snatch from the hands of the victors, from the oppression of the continuity of their time and ‘progress’. For this ‘progress’ is founded upon the continuity of catastrophe, on the defeat of the denied bodies and stories of those excluded: the ruins of history.29

In this way Benjamin’s project mediates the political implications of capital and industrialisation through the cultural materiality of the gaze, the touch, of movement and the fragment. Thus, it is as much within the cracks and fissures in our material selves as in material time, that what has been lost and forgotten, the ruins of the Other may be found. The blasting of historical time, the blasting of ourselves thus

29 Ian Chambers, “History, The Baroque and the Judgement of the Angels,” in The Actuality of Walter Benjamin, ed. Laura Marcus and Lynda Nead (London: Lawrence & Wishart Limited, 1998), 186.

140 re-configures the excluded body of the convict into the phantasmagoric space of the present.

3.7 - Shadow play

The politics of phantasmagorical representation brings my own work into contact with the North American artist Kara Walker. Walker came to critical attention in the late 1990s with a series of large-scale panoramic installations, which in format, scale and materiality parallel many of the same aesthetic preoccupations found in Sally Smart’s practice. As with Smart, Walker’s work is structured within a surreal, fantasy- world made up of life-sized figures, cut out in silhouette from black paper. Similarly both artists also explore questions related to female identity and performance. However around these points of commonality there also reside distinct differences. In relation to content, one of the most overt points of difference between the two artists’ concerns is Walker’s exploration of racism and race; while Walker’s practice is also markedly more graphic in its abject representation of defecation, mutilation and sexual desire/ interaction.

The issue of race occupies a central position within Walker’s work, and in a sense can be read as the fulcrum around which her other concerns turn. In looking to unpack this issue, Walker draws upon African-American stereotypes associated with America’s Southern antebellum period such as the Mammy, the Sapphire, Uncle Tom, Sambo and the Jezebel Walkers. Re-imagined and reconstructed within her installations, Walker utilises these stereotypes to complicate questions of contemporary racial representation in America. In this way Kara Walker’s work utilises a moment of historical rupture to critically unpack a nexus of themes related to narrative, memory, gender, race, nation and identity; an aesthetic methodology I attempt to also deploy within my own work. In relation to Walker’s practice, these thematic concerns are situated within a surreal fantasy world, a space in which antebellum forms are violently recast within a carnivalesque sensibility.

141 Walker’s practice presents as a type of dream work, which draws upon a psychological framework to explore the multiple array of selves situated between the individual and the State. As Walker explains:

Each one of the larger pieces I conceive as a kind of dreamscape. It encompasses all of these different characters or elements that are all aspects of yourself or your psyche or some of the people in your life, manifested in different forms. I think that when I work out the large pieces, I’m half conscious of keeping a sort of balance, even if it starts off in a skewed place, so that if some of the actions are ugly or ambiguous or not in keeping with a progressive view of ourselves, then I try and at least make the gesture beautiful, and ultimately the form is beautiful.30

In this description, Walker subsequently conceptualises a space, a dreamscape, which in its proliferation of difficult and ambiguous performances, folds over into a Benjaminian understanding of the phantasmagorical experience; one that relates not only to the content of Walker’s practice but also its form.

Consequently, when we look at a detail from her 1997 installation titled Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, By Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored (Figure 9), we find a confluence of formal elements. From the scale of the installation, the formal use of the black silhouette, its panoramic quality and the repetitive figural representation of desire, violence and death, these elements together evoke a phantasmagoric moment of traumatic conflagration. The figurative elements in this detail such as the hunched form of the elderly black man playing a banjo, the young girl standing behind him and the older woman leaping through the air, embody a type of after image in which the form of the cut-out on the wall references the exchange between lantern and shadow.

In relation to Walker’s practice this exchange between lantern and silhouette speaks to a process of both loss and recovery. Thus the presence of the silhouette functions as a type of historical reference, or spectral stain, that marks the ghostly

30 Kara Walker, “Thelma Golden/Kara Walker: A Dialogue,” interview by Thelma Golden, Kara Walker: Pictures From Another Time, ed. Annette Dixon (New York: The Regents of the University of Michigan, 2002), 45. 142 remains of the missing body/s which should have but never actually did stand before them. In this context Walker’s antebellum silhouettes, like a tableau of ghostly Pompeian figures, evoke a quality of historical loss that parallels the violent racism of censor and eraser located around the African American form. Frozen on the wall, Walker’s characters however evoke not only a sense of historical displacement, but in the residual racism of their stereotypical physiognomy also a sense of representational displacement. In this context, the silhouette’s signification of racial identity embodies a type of racist projection which is more real and easier to see than the subjects themselves.

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS

Figure 9. Kara Walker, Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, By Myself, Missus K.E.B. Walker, Colored, 1997. Cut paper and adhesive on wall, size variable. Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art.

Yet, at the same time Walker’s silhouettes riotously, violently resist these forms of loss. Instead through their outrageous displays of abject, corporal defiance, these silhouettes, like a gallery of rouge shadows, refuse to be silenced or displaced. In this way the silhouettes hover across the gallery walls like maniacal, recalcitrant incarnations of Peter Pan’s shadow; a comparison that speaks to the uncanny way in

143 which the processes of identity, representation and fantasy located around African American identity simultaneously collapses into and also slips out through our scopic desires.

As political/cultural theorist Mark Reinhardt writes in the catalogue essay “The Art of Racial Profiling”:

To look at Walker’s silhouette is to confront the deeds and misdeeds of shadows, shadows acting – and this increases the uncanniness – of their own volition. The effect is heightened further still by the fact that these are portraits not of living bodies but of figures of collective fantasy and phobia: they are thus, in a sense, the spectators’ own shadows.31

Reinhardt’s reading of Walker’s practice underscores the manner in which representation is both of the body and beyond the body. Across the phantasmagoric landscape of Walker’s work a plane of mimetic complicity unfolds, the production of which implicates us all. No matter how hard we try to tie down our collective and individual shadows, the spectral ruins of the past will not be contained. The shadows of American antebellum slavery, like the shadows of Australia’s convict slavery, embody a mode of spectral representation that lies not at the edge but at the centre of European Modernity. Both Walker’s work and my own address the manner in which cultural mechanisms such as art, history, and the nation function like ghost houses overrun with haunted rooms, displaced bodies and marginalised memories.

3.8 - Retail therapy

In keeping with these concerns, if we return to my practice and in particular the installation piece Window Shopping: A Phantasmagorical Guide for Talking to Convicts, we find the notion of spectral masculinity located around my use of mimic repetition and material displacement. Subsequently in Window Shopping both these mechanisms are addressed through the corporal physicality of fourteen semi-figurative figures that range in size up to approximately seventy centimetres high. Each figure is constructed

31 Mark Reinhardt, “The Art of Racial Profiling,” inKara Walker: Narratives of a Negress, ed. Ian Berry, Darby English, Vivian Patterson, and Mark Reinhardt (Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003), 119. 144 out of a mixture of found wood, craft/vernacular materials and second-hand items. For example, in Convict Sculpture 1 (Figure 10) the torso is made from driftwood, and its legs, feet, backside, neck and penis use blocks of machined wood. The arms are made from kindling, while the hands are plastic and the head is made from plaster with a set of plastic doll’s eyes. While this combination of elements is closely replicated across the fourteen sculptures, each one is differentiated from the others through the use of colour, the choice of a particular wood for the legs or torso, the different sizes of the limbs, feet and neck and their drawn facial features.

Figure 10. Shannon Field, Window Shopping: A phantasmagorical guide for talking to convicts (Convict Sculpture 1), 2012-13. Detail. Mixed media, size variable. Property of the artist.

In the context of Window Shopping: A Phantasmagorical Guide for Talking to Convicts the hybrid arrangement of materials associated with each sculpture speaks to the spectral fragmentation of both Australia’s convict experience and the performance of contemporary heterosexual masculinity. These convict spectres haunt, and are haunted by, their heterogeneous form. The materiality of the sculptures in this installation conveys a sense of fractured liminal displacement, which parallels the liminal materiality associated with Walker’s silhouettes. As with Walker, my practice

145 destabilises hegemonic signification through a deviant aesthetic hybridity. That is, the material repetition situated both within and across these convict sculptures speaks to cultural anxieties located around the mimetic reproduction of identity. These hybrid convict sculptures speak to the unoriginality located within all modes of representation, an unoriginality that not only disturbs the convict’s historical form, but also its gendered form.

The fractured instability of Australian heterosexual masculinity is evoked not only through the convict sculpture’s incorporation of disparate materials but importantly also through the repetitive proliferation of phallic appendages. Like the misaligned form of Frankenstein’s monster, the prosthetic quality to these Convict’s penises foregrounds a deviant misaligned masculinity. The phallus is present but absent in these sculptures. Like a phantom attachment it is both of, but clearly not of, each sculpture. Consequently the overt multiplicity of convict phalluses points not only to the over-determination embedded within the ideological inscription of identity but also to the excessive fetishisation of patriarchal representation around the phallic form.

Read this way, the convict phallic appendages attached to these sculptures are emblematic of a reticulated fetishised experience. The original fetishised movement/ gaze outwards and away from the castrated phallus has returned, folding back onto the spectral forms that are their prosthetic penises. Subsequently, these wooden phalluses signify a double displacement in which the convict phallus can never be attached to the convict form because it is always cast in the shadow of the fetish; it is an object always on the move and one that has just returned from elsewhere or is in the process of leaving. In this way, as Laura Mulvey writes in Fetishism and Curiosity, fetishism functions as a type of commemoration:

It is a sign left behind by the original moment of castration anxiety and is also a mark of mourning for the lost object. The fetish as sign includes, therefore, even in its fixed belief in the female penis, a residual knowledge of its origin. The fetish object fixes and freezes the historic event outside rational memory and individual chronology. But the fetish still stays in touch with its original

146 traumatic real and retains a potential access to its own historical story.32

In this description, Mulvey foregrounds the manner in which the fetishised act is haunted by an inability to completely reconfigure/re-imagine the original moment of traumatic anxiety associated with phallic castration. The ongoing repetition of the fetish thus necessitates that the originating trauma remains unreconcilable. In a similar fashion, the fetishised reproduction of the convict phallus in my work speaks to a mode of monstrous masculinity that is culturally trapped within its own moment of violent semiotic castration.

At the same time, a degree of comic tension exists around this phallic over- determination; a moment of excessive farce which relates to the disjuncture between the desire of the phallus to assert or occupy a position of authority within the terrain of signification, and the partial or incomplete incorporation of its physical form within the sculptures themselves. The convict spectre inhabits an absurdist carnivalesque mode of masculinity, one that mimics the form of hegemonic masculinity but does so from a position that is both outside and inside the fold of patriarchal inscription. A sense of incongruity permeates through the sculptures as indeed it does throughout all my work. This is an incongruity that oscillates between the violence of masculinity and the comic absurdity of masculine identity; a process in which both are constantly folding over and collapsing into the other. This incongruous, fractured dynamic in turn marks out not only the historical condition of convict heterosexual masculinity, but also the ongoing performance of contemporary Australian masculinity. Both expressions of masculine identity are structured around a sense of deviant mimicry that turns upon repetition.

My work then, is structured around a radical spectrality; which in the context of my practice speaks to the trauma of Australia’s convict experience. The trauma of the transportation of over 165,000 mainly male convicts to Australia constitutes a moment of personal and collective trauma that, in its signifying displacement, continues to impact upon performance of Australian national identity and masculinity. In this way

32 Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1996), 5. 147 my practice seeks to excavate through the ruins of Australia’s phantasmagorical history, in the process opening up the spectral form of the convict to the spatial landscape of the present.

3.9 - There’s no place like home

In the context of this relationship between landscape, gender and ideology Benjamin’s phantasmagorical reading of culture is significant in that it extends the spectral experience beyond the temporal into the spatial. As a result the phantasmagoria simultaneously spills out beyond the confines of the theatre and the stage to encompass the street, the suburb and the nation, while at the same time moving inward into the interior world of the mind. In this way when Benjamin writes that the phantasmagoria

“appears now as a landscape, now as a room,”33 he evokes a sense of liminal movement between interiority and exteriority, between the room, street and the mind that shifts the theatrical specificity of the phantasmagoria out into the realm of social and cultural space. This is a space informed by our urban and suburban environment.

The significance of place is that it acts both as a conduit, simultaneously linking as well as altering a range of ideological positions, such as history, memory, nation and the subject; while at the same time also providing a physical trace that marks out our present ideological preoccupations. As Professor J.E. Malpas writes:

We are the sort of thinking, remembering, experiencing creatures we are only in virtue of our active engagement in place; that the possibility of mental life is necessarily tied to such engagement, and so to the places in which we are so engaged; and that, when we come to give content to our concepts of ourselves and to the idea of our own self-identity, place and locality play a crucial role – our identities are, one can say, intricately and essentially place-bound.34

Place, in this context is specifically located within the historical development of European Modernity and is a term that subsequently encompasses both our physical and

33 Benjamin, The Arcades Project, 21.

34 J.E. Malpas, Place and Experience: A Philosophical Topography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 177.

148 imagined environments. In this way the representation of heterosexual masculinity, as it is reproduced within contemporary Australia, is intimately connected to and enunciated by place. In the case of The Boys, the immediate environment of the Sprague family’s home is situated within the unfolding landscape of Australia’s suburban imagination.

While the question of Australia’s suburban experience is a fraught, highly- contested proposition, the dominance of the suburban form in relation to Australia’s built environment marks these sites out as being central to any understanding of the psychological and cultural construction of Australian identity/masculinity. Certainly, to the extent that suburbia is as much an imagined space as a geographic one, any unifying proposition is inherently problematic. However a partial definition would certainly point to the residential function of suburbia. In its broadest sense the suburban form might be described as a low-density area that is specifically structured around, and provides for, our private lives. Suburbia remains distinctly separate from the public life of the urban, the industrial and the metropolis. If in the past a univocal understanding of suburbia has oversimplified and homogenised the entire experience, recent analysis has sought to present a more complex, nuanced understanding of the suburban environment. Australia is comprised not of a single suburban form, but instead is made up of a plethora of different suburban experiences and qualities; many of which have generated positive, creative outcomes, while others have led to more negative, disruptive spaces. In this sense a variety of factors ranging from geography, history, economics, fashion, class, gender and politics have all influenced and complicated the Australian suburban environment and given rise to a multitude of varying suburbias.

While the focus of this research is directed towards the problematic qualities of the suburban experience, my position should not be read as a continuance of what cultural academic Garry Kinnane refers to as Australia’s “anti-suburbanism”; a mode of cultural expression that has a long tradition of dismissing the suburbs and the suburban experience as dull, conservative, insular and domestic, and which Kinnane argues has been particularly prevalent within the creative and academic spheres of Australian

149 life.35 At the same time, the history of anti-suburbanism in Australia mustn’t preclude or exempt specific aspects of the Australia’s suburban experience from any form of critical gaze. It is a particular mode of suburbia that holds my attention, a habitat situated out on the plains of greater western Sydney; made up of a range of suburbs such as Blacktown, Bankstown, Cabramatta, and Mt Druitt. Within these suburbs are the sorts of environments depicted in the film The Boys; these environments however need to be viewed through the lens of place and time, they are not indicative of any one suburb and should not be regarded as representative of the diverse array of economic, social and political experiences lived within Western Sydney. Rather these elements represent particular pockets of suburban experience, those few street, houses or blocks, which for a variety of reasons have become marginalised and left behind.

Predominately made up of the working poor and the unemployed, the residents in these areas in Sydney are often located in housing estates that reside across flat geographic expanses of land. These working class suburbs were part of a broader cultural undertaking that began in Australia shortly after the end of the Second World War. The long boom of the 1950s and 60s saw Australia’s economic prosperity inexorably linked to Australia’s suburban project; a prosperity which seemed to suggest in Australia at least that suburbia’s utopian potential was on the cusp of being realised. However this all faded away with the political, social and economic instability of the 1970s, and led to a radical restructuring of Australia’s suburban experience. For those like the Sprague family, living furthest out, in the suburbs with the least financial security, the political response to the collapse of the long boom has been devastating. As Professor of Urban Policy Brendan Gleeson writes:

Funding for public housing began a long and sustained decline from the 1970s … Broadacre public housing estates, which previously contained a mixture of housing types, including working families, entered a spiral of change that saw

35 Garry Kinnane, “Shopping at Last !: History, Fiction and the Anti-Suburban Tradition,” in Writing the Everyday: Australian Literature and the Limits of Suburbia, ed. Andrew McCann (St Lucia, Queensland: University of Queensland Press, 1998), 41-42.

150 them transformed into increasingly homogenous welfare dependent communities. The concentration of public housing in inner-city high-rise and suburban low-rise estates meant that such areas emerged as new poles of deprivation. New forms of absolute disadvantage also surfaced, notably poverty in the private rental sector, and outright homelessness.36

In effect, the residents living in these housing estates, and the environment, which accommodates Brett and his family, are emblematic of what happens when political support is withdrawn and economic prosperity collapses.

In these estranged suburbs the phantasmagorical interaction with capital has lost its magic and wonder, replaced by a sense of psychological disquiet, anxiety and anger. The landscape and environment Brett Sprague finds himself in - its isolation, displacement, hardness and poverty - works upon his masculinity. Like Alexander Pearce in the Tasmanian wilderness, the wilderness of Brett’s environment works upon his sense of identity and gender. Indeed the environmental and emotional isolation often associated with the Australian landscape in some ways seems to have been unconsciously reproduced within Australia’s suburban sprawl. A sense of desperate violence circulates between the Sprague house and the surrounding suburban environment, which for art/cultural critic Andrew Frost attests to:

A series of internal battlefields; the battle for dominance between Brett, his brothers, Sandra, Michelle and the poor, frightened Nola; the struggle to gain control of what Sewell calls ‘Glenn’s soul’ – the attempt to lay blame for the misery of the characters, either on each other, or on those nebulous others called ‘them’ – all of this set inside the Sprague home, perhaps substituting, in its particular detail, for the larger Anglo-Irish culture of Australian suburbia.37

In this sense, as Frost suggests, these battles for dominance relate not only to the exchanges between individual members of the Sprague family but also involve an ongoing battle with the suburban landscape itself and a relentless battle with their own masculinity. The performance of a certain type of heterosexual masculinity in Australia, that is, its specificity to Australia, is intimately bound up with place and environment.

36 Brendan Gleeson, Australian Heartlands: Making Space for Hope in the Suburbs (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2006.), 35.

37 Frost, The Boys, 53. 151 In this way Brett Sprague and his brothers don’t only move through their environment, their environment is also moving through them.

In The Boys, this suburban environment is at once both degraded and dislocated; evoking a sense of economic redundancy and impoverishment that directly questions the Sprague brothers’ agency and masculinity. After all, in the contemporary landscape of late Capitalism, the failure to achieve economic independence still suggests for men a certain lack or failure of masculinity. In other words, real men provide for their family, real men are economically successful/fertile, real men are emotionally and financially integrated into society. This conflation of economic empowerment with heterosexual masculinity is linked to and reproduced by the Australian landscape.

In The Boys the phantasmagoric experience of suburbia only leads to an interior world of loss, violence and despair. Circling aimlessly around on these freeway/byways the brothers, and by extension Australian masculinity, finds itself trapped within the endless loop of empirical time, desperately trying to flee from the spectre of a past that is un-remembered but still refuses to disappear. Thus the brothers drive onwards into a darkness whose only salvation is a false sense of escape, of a movement that impels them away from the scene of so many crimes and towards so many more. In this sense the violence that unfolds towards the end of the film, the rape and murder of a woman, is a violence for which the brothers are responsible; and yet it also marks out an array of intersecting narratives of Australian violence that pass through them and for which they are only marginally aware themselves. The double tragedy of this moment is that the violence, which they inflict and the loss they create around this woman stems from their own spectral loss. The brothers’ violent performance of masculinity embodies the patriarchal despair that haunts all Australian heterosexual masculine positions; a form of spectral displacement in which ideological violence is inscribed not only within the male body, but is replicated within the built environment of Australia’s suburban experience.

152 CHAPTER FOUR:

From Deserts Monsters Come

153 In this chapter I use the filmWolf Creek to extend convict masculinity beyond the confines of suburbia and into the conceptual space of the Australian desert. The trope of the Australian outback facilitates the exploration of the relationship between Australian heterosexual masculinity, place and national identity. In looking to prise open the ideological gaps between masculinity, place, and national identity, Walter Benjamin’s Gothic formulation of degraded repetition is deployed to address the interaction between mimetic misrecognition, cultural drag, and aesthetic mediation. Starting with a discussion of the film Wolf Creek, the chapter is divided broadly into four sections. The first of these sections foregrounds the role and impact that melancholic representation plays in the colonial and post-colonial reproduction of European Australian identity. The second explores some of the aesthetic and political issues associated with the ideological construction of the white aborigine. In the third section, Benjamin’s notion of the ragpicker is applied to the filmWolf Creek as a means of unpacking some of the cultural mechanisms that underscore the performance and reproduction of Australian cultural identity. Finally, in the fourth section the politics of blackface minstrelsy is used to explore the relationship between Anglo-Australian masculinity, representation and national identity. Incorporated into and around these sections is a discussion of my own practice along with that of the artists Sidney Nolan and Shawn Gladwell.

Released in 2005, Wolf Creek follows three young backpackers, Kristy, Liz and Ben as they drive from Broome on the West Australian coast across semi-arid desert to Wolf Creek National Park. The narrative arc of the film is structured around two acts; the first depicts the journey in getting to Wolf Creek, while the second is concerned with the events that unfold on their arrival. In the second act, a larrikin outback character known as Mick Taylor kidnaps, brutally assaults and tortures the three backpackers, eventually murdering the two female leads with Ben just managing to escape.1 While a level of realism underpins Wolf Creek, of the three films discussed it is perhaps the

1 Wolf Creek, directed by Greg McLean (Australia: Australian Film finance corporation, South Australian Film Corporation, 403 Productions, True Crime Channel, Best FX (Boom Sound), Emu Creek Pictures and Mushroom Pictures, 2005) DVD. 154 closest in format to the traditional horror or slasher genre, referencing in tone and content a range of films from Deliverance, to The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In terms of Wolf Creek, Greg Mclean as writer, producer and director specifically plays upon various Australian anxieties relating to the European relationship with the Australian outback.

From the moment the First Fleet arrived in 1788 the colonists’ relationship with their new environment had been constructed around a matrix of contradictions, uncertainties and misunderstandings. The unique wildlife, botany and geography were simultaneously marvelled at, resented and feared. At the same time the European hope of a habitable centre to the Australian continent descended further and further into ironic disappointment as European exploration instead revealed a semi-arid desert environment that seemed devoid of life. Thus the Australian environment has, from the beginning of settlement/invasion, refused to conform to the European imagination, a refusal that in turn has undermined the colonial and postcolonial sense of authority.

In the realm of European cultural production, this fragility/uncertainty in both colonial and contemporary Australia has often been expressed within a melancholic aesthetic. While melancholy is a notoriously slippery concept that dates back to ancient Greece in a European context; for the purposes of this thesis I shall focus upon a cultural/psychological understanding that references the work of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin. Provisionally then, melancholy might be likened to a performative expression of loss and a particular form of grieving associated with the loss/disruption of meaning. Melancholy in this sense is not the loss itself but the remembrance of that loss; it marks the remains of an experience that refuses personal/cultural integration. Melancholy thus attests to and resides within the rupturing of narrative meaning associated with traumatic events. It is the expression and the residue of a trauma that will not or cannot heal.

155 4.1 - Melancholic monsters

For Benjamin melancholy is as much a discursive mechanism as it is an emotional state, one that when deployed in a considered fashion augments the blasting apart of historicism. However Benjamin also recognised that melancholy is a notion which all too easily slides into cliché. In his essay Left-Wing Melancholy, Benjamin critically denounced this clichéd use of melancholy, arguing that when deployed in this manner by left-wing writers/artists it functions as a form of false melancholy; a gesture of empty remorse, a pretence of loss used to mask a resigned ineffectiveness or indifference, that also works to maintain the existing hegemonic status quo2. In contrast to this, Benjamin’s expression of political melancholy is a radicalised sentiment intimately wedded to the possibility of change. As Benjamin writes in, The Origin Of German Tragic Drama:

All this vanishes with this one about-turn, in which the immersion of allegory has to clear away the final phantasmagoria of the objective and, left entirely to its own devices, re-discovers itself, not in the earthly world of things, but seriously under the eyes of heaven. And this is the essence of melancholy immersion: that its ultimate objects, in which it believes it can most fully secure for itself that which is vile, turn into allegories, and that these allegories fill out and deny the void in which they are represented, just as, ultimately, the intention does not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection.3

For Benjamin then, melancholy is an allegorical mechanism that, like the dialectical image, is constituted around an internal sense of contradiction.

This melancholic turn has been one of the central motifs to dominate both visual and cultural expression in Australia over the past two hundred years. For cultural/ literary theorists like Bernard Smith, Ken Gelder, Roslynn D. Haynes and Ian McLean, this melancholic sensibility is a motif that dominates much of the colony’s early cultural

2 Walter Benjamin, “Left-Wing Melancholy,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol 2 1927- 1934, ed. by Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland and Gary Smith, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1972; Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 423-427. Citations refer to The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

3 Benjamin, The Origin of German, 232-233. 156 life, expressing the colonists’ particular sense of loss, displacement and alienation. Ken Gelder, for instance, argues that melancholy was a sentiment present “so often in colonial writing as to make it paradigmatic.”4 While Ian McLean goes even further, suggesting that melancholy should be regarded as a meta-trope underpinning not only Australia’s colonial history, but also Europe’s entire colonial enterprise.5 In this way the notion of melancholy extends beyond the individual to the collective, in the process facilitating a broader range of possible cultural interpretations. Importantly, during Australia’s early colonial period the cultural articulation of melancholy was structured around both the literary models of Gothic/Romantic fiction and the visual aesthetics of the picturesque, the grotesque and the sublime.

The situating of these literary and aesthetic processes together within a rubric of melancholic expression runs through the gamut of early Australian cultural production appearing in paintings, novels, explorer’s journals and private diaries. The central narrative underpinning these expressions of melancholia is the relationship between the European subject and the Australian bush/desert environments. It is the Australian environment then that comes to incorporate those European Gothic architectural tropes of castle, dungeon and graveyard; as Dr. Roslynn D. Haynes writes in Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art And Film:

The most alarming prospect faced by the inland explorers, coming from the confines of heavily populated Britain and Europe, was that of the void.This was particularly true of the desert with its repeated vistas of empty horizontal planes under a cloudless, overarching sky. It therefore seems paradoxical that this vast expanse of apparently empty space was so frequently described, in their accounts, in Gothic terms of enclosure and entrapment.6

For Dr. Haynes, there is an analogous relationship between Gothic literature and the

4 Ken Gelder, “Australian Gothic,” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (New York: Routledge, 2007), 117.

5 Ian McLean, “Under Saturn: Melancholy and the Colonial Imagination,” in Double Vision: Art Histories and Colonial Histories in the Pacific, ed. Nicholas Thomas and Diane Losche (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 136.

6 Roslynn D. Haynes, Seeking the Centre: The Australian Desert in Literature, Art and Film, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 77. 157 sublime that spills over into the initial European response to the Australian environment. Read this way, it is the very expansiveness of the Australian desert that disturbed colonial explorers such as Charles Sturt. Confronted by such an infinite, repetitive space as the central desert, these explorers experienced a countervailing sense of confinement and imprisonment that they described in their expedition journals.

In the context of Wolf Creek this anxiety of entrapment within the expansive space of the Australian interior is a central preoccupation. Like the earlier film, Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, the landscape in Wolf Creek seems to harbour a malevolent presence, a spectre of ancient power capable of consuming anything that enters its sphere of influence. As John Scott and Dean Biron write, in Wolf Creek, “the landscape functions to entrap the three victims. They are like the majority of Australia’s earliest European inhabitants, the convicts, caught in a natural prison without bars. The terrain is no longer an object for these tourists to consume – they have to an extent become its prisoners.”7 In this way the environment in both Picnic at Hanging Rock and Wolf Creek functions as a specific character that eventually comes to dominate the narrative arc of both films.

In Wolf Creek the Gothic terror that awaits the three backpackers is immediately established through the idyllic opening sequences, which depict a utopian environment of beaches, coastlines and parties that is too perfect, too idyllic. In effect it forewarns the audience that this moment of joyous wonder in fact functions as a signifier of the innocence/hope/youth and life that is soon to be lost. This impending descent is also ominously implied through an exchange between the young Ben and a local car salesman. Ben has come to buy a car for the trip across the desert; however as the conversation between them progresses the car salesman somehow knows that Ben is travelling with two female companions and proceeds to make lurid sexual suggestions concerning this situation. Ben is disgusted but ignores the salesman, buys a car and

7 John Scott and Dean Biron, “Wolf Creek, Rurality and the Australian Gothic,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 24, no. 2 (April 2010): 307-322, http://dx.doi.org/10.108/10304310903576358. 158 leaves as quickly as he can.8 This exchange is important because it not only foregrounds a foreboding sexual undertone; it also establishes a tension between the local and the outsider that signals Ben as well as his friends’ misunderstanding/underestimation of the locals, who are symbolically embedded within the environment. Consequently, the film is able to convey to the audience a sense of Gothic portent that the characters themselves are completely oblivious to; indeed the tension that builds up in the first half of the film is reliant upon a doubling of this trope, in effect the misrecognition of misrecognition.

4.2 - Strange scribblings

Thus melancholy can be read as the trace or the scar that marks out the trauma of this double misrecognition. Consequently this notion of seeing but not understanding generates a melancholic sensibility that resonates deeply across the national psyche. It is perhaps useful at this point to discuss a preface Marcus Clarke wrote for a book of poetry by Adam Lindsay Gordon (1895). In this preface Clarke transmogrifies the trope of monstrous melancholy directly into the Australian landscape itself. As Clarke writes:

The Australian mountain forests are funereal, secret, stern. Their solitude is desolation. They seem to stifle, in their black gorges, a story of sullen despair. No tender sentiment is nourished in the shade ... [in] Australia alone is to be found the Grotesque, the Weird, the strange scribbling of nature learning how to write. Some see no beauty in our trees without shade, our flowers without perfume, our birds who cannot fly, and our beasts who have not yet learned to walk on all fours. But the dweller in the wilderness acknowledges the subtle charm of this fantastic land of monstrosities. He becomes familiar with the beauty of loneliness.9

In this passage as Clarke alternates between the melancholic despair of Australian “funeral forests”, “black gorges” and grotesque beasts, to a romantic appreciation for the “beauty of loneliness” he evokes a poignant sense of longing that for Ken Gelder

8 Wolf Creek, Greg McLean, DVD.

9 Marcus Clarke, Preface to Poems: Sea Spray and Smoke Drift. Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes. Miscellaneous Poems. Ashtaroth: A Dramatic Lyric, by Adam Lindsay Gordon (London: R.A. Thompson & Co, 1895), xi. https://ia600300.us.archive.org/22/items/poemsgordon00gord/ poemsgordon00gord_bw.pdf. 159 expresses “the loss of a certain kind of colonial optimism.”10 On the other hand when Clarke writes of “the beauty of loneliness,”11 perhaps he isn’t expressing a loss of a colonial optimism but rather a loss for a colonial optimism that will, and could, never be. In effect the young colony’s apparent optimism and energy towards the end of the nineteenth century and the haste with which it turned towards the future, was a desperate attempt to install a type of cultural optimism which wasn’t actually there, instead glossing over and wantonly misrecognising the underlying melancholic currents that were flowing around our convict history.

For Ian McLean, Marcus Clarke’s use of melancholy in this piece represents a redemptive manoeuvre, which enabled the European subject/s to project themselves into the colonial landscape. In this way melancholy represents a process through which control over the environment and by extension the Indigenous population was established. Consequently the melancholic trope functions as a signifier of cultural transition for the European subject; marking out both what is destroyed/lost and what is gained/consumed through the invading colonial gaze.12 However as McLean himself points out, the cultural function of melancholia in Australia has never completely succeeded in “cementing” a European sense of belonging.13 In fact, the failure to successfully do so suggests there is something else beyond the clash between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples that is driving the cultural expression of Antipodean melancholy.

In the context of this thesis that something is the convict body. What Clark sees as he describes the monstrous form of the Australian wilderness isn’t so much a grotesque landscape as the gothic shadow of the convict himself, a weirdly melancholic

10 Ken Gelder, “Australian Gothic,” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, ed. Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy (New York: Routledge, 2007), 116-117.

11 Clark, Preface to Poems Sea Spay, xi

12 McLean, “Under Saturn: Melancholy,” 137.

13 Ibid., 158.

160 spectre that haunts European Modernity. Clarke’s preface arguably provides a type of cultural template for the colonial expression of melancholy; managing to convey the manner in which the European imagination in Australia is structured around desire and lack, whereby the beauty of the Australian environment is articulated through its monstrous resistance to European sublimation.

Returning to the film Wolf Creek, this process of monstrous resistance resonates powerfully around the character Mick Taylor. Entering the film’s second act, when the three backpackers arrive at Wolf Creek National Park, Taylor at first seems a cliché of the knock-about Australian ‘bushy’, the quintessential man of the land, the noble jackaroo. His psychotic, violent temperament is only revealed once he has taken them to his compound and drugged and imprisoned them. Taylor is a sadistic monster hell- bent on inflicting as much pain as he can before murdering his three young captives. However Taylor is much more than a violent individual. There are mythic and iconic qualities to his characterisation which suggest, in a semiotic sense, that his character also occupies the indexical or thematic centre of the film, embodying simultaneously a number of different cultural positions. In this way Taylor can be read as embodying an unyielding and malevolent Australian environment; he is the psychic darkness of the European imagination, the patriarchal psychosis, and a displaced past exacting revenge upon the present.

While for Greg McLean, the director and writer of Wolf Creek, the exact nature of Mick Taylor is ambiguous, the manner in which Mick appears to vanish into thin air towards the very end of the film evokes not only the possibility of a supernatural link between Mick and the Australian desert, but also suggests an environment intimately associated with destructive uncontrollable violence. As Scott and Biron argue, the outback as depicted in Wolf Creek is a “space of spiritual degeneration, as opposed to national regeneration. The outback is not a passive place of consumption but a site in which familiar trajectories are reversed and those who would consume are themselves

161 consumed.”14 In foregrounding these environmental qualities of degeneration, reversal and presence, Scott and Biron’s assessment of the landscape in Wolf Creek situates the film within both Marcus Clarke’s literary, melancholic description of the Australian bush as well as the cinematic tradition of gothic slasher/horror/sci-fi films. Wolf Creek not only represents Australia’s ongoing turn to the melancholic but also links together the disparate landscapes presented in the films Van Diemen’s Land and The Boys. The trauma of Australia’s founding convict moment is transposed across both time and space, navigating its way from Tasmania’s colonial wilderness, through the suburbs of contemporary western Sydney and out into the mythic heart of Australia’s central desert. The melancholic trauma associated with these landscapes plays out not only within a physical space but also a psychological space.

4.3 - Man crush

In this psychoanalytic context, Judith Butler’s essay Melancholy Gender/ Refused Identification provides a possible entry point into an exploration of convictism, heterosexual masculinity in relation to Australian contemporary identity. In this essay Butler incorporates aspects of Freud’s earlier paper, Mourning and Melancholia (1917) with his later paper, The Ego and the Id (1923); arguing that the two papers illustrate a significant shift in Freud’s understanding of melancholia. Where initially Freud believed the resolution of a melancholic episode required the complete letting go of the conflicted object, later he concludes that there is in fact only a partial letting go of the object. A trace of each melancholic experience and its conflicted object, is not only marked upon the ego, it is incorporated into the very process of ego identification. Butler then utilises this understanding of melancholy within a gendered framework that focuses upon the relationship between heterosexuality and homosexuality. Significantly Butler suggests that in so far as gender/sexuality is reproduced through both cultural/social mechanisms as well as through individual psychic mechanisms, expressions of melancholia can also be described as playing out within the broader body politic of cultural reproduction.

14 Scott and Biron, “Wolf Creek Rurality,” 319-320. 162 Subsequently melancholia is as much a cultural condition as a psychic aliment.15

For Butler, the performance of heterosexual masculinity is reliant upon a disavowal of a homosexuality to which it is unconsciously attached. Expressions of cultural and individual melancholy are generated around the loss associated with the pre-emptive incorporation of the homosexual object/love within the ego. Importantly Butler suggests that if:

Melancholia in Freud’s sense is the effect of an ungrieved loss, it may be that performance, understood as “acting out,” is essentially related to the problem of unacknowledged loss. Where there is an ungrieved loss in drag performance, perhaps it is a loss that is refused and incorporated in the performed identification, one that reiterates a gendered idealization and its radical uninhabitability. This is, then neither a territorialisation of the feminine by the masculine nor a sign of the essential plasticity of gender. What it does suggest is that the performance allegorizes a loss it cannot grieve, allegorizes the incorporative fantasy of melancholia whereby an object is phantasmatically taken in or on as a way of refusing to let it go. Gender itself might be understood in part as the “acting out” of unresolved grief.16

Butler’s analysis, specifically her suggestion that gender can be read as an acting“ out of unresolved grief, ”17 foregrounds the manner in which gender/sexuality function within an active, rather than a passive cultural space; thereby providing a semiotic opening through which questions of antipodean melancholy might be expanded upon.

In the context of Australian identity, masculinity and convictism, the acting out of melancholy through gender might therefore be described not only as an expression of an unresolved grief for the disavowal of homosexual desire, but also a melancholic grief associated with the disavowal of the male convict’s entire sexual being. That is, at the time of the industrial revolution when libidinal and economic mechanisms were forging an intricate bond between masculinity and capitalism, the apparent inability of the convicts to integrate productively into the hegemonic political order became interpreted as a serious moral flaw.

15 Judith Butler, “Melancholy Gender/ Refused Identification,” in Constructing Masculinity, ed. Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis and Simon Watson (New York: Routledge, 1995), 22-29.

16 Ibid., 32.

17 Ibid., 31-31. 163 Taylor’s performance in Wolf Creek can be seen as a manifestation of Australia’s broader cultural melancholy in relation to the self and the landscape, a manifestation that harbours within it a decidedly uncanny sensibility. Taylor’s performance evokes an uncanny form of cultural drag in which one trope; the resigned, laconic Australian character is conflated with another trope, the violent, psychotic hillbilly. Inspired by Paul Hogan’s character Mick Dundee from the film Crocodile Dundee, Mick Taylor, in utilising the iconic mythology that surrounds this archetype, not only encompasses the dark side to the Dundee persona but also the dark, destructive side of the European Australian imagination. The uncanny sensibility inhabited by Mick Taylor relates not so much to the fact that he initially appears good but is actually bad, rather it develops out of the essentialist mis/reading of his character, in which a zombie–like Taylor drags the hollowed-out form of the white Aborigine/Dundee, around the desert.

4.4 - The politics of skin

While the notion of a white Aborigine is a problematic one; what it does foreground is the desire on the part of non-Indigenous subjects to acquire a presence or place within the landscape that is akin to the perceived spiritual link between the Indigenous population and the natural environment. Within a contemporary context, Mick Taylor is but one example of this European cultural fantasy. Before Taylor there was Mick Dundee and perhaps most recently, Steve Irwin, the nature conservationist and action man. In all three, this notion of the white Aborigine is located around an environmental performance, which depicts them as nomadic, isolated individuals, who are able to successfully navigate their way through the Australian landscape. In this way they display a level of knowledge or understanding of the environment that seems to replicate the notion of spirituality that has been assigned to the Indigenous population. The performances associated with Taylor, Dundee and Irwin arguably transform their knowledge of the Australian environment into a type of religious communion with the environment, a process that in turn transforms them into white Aborigines.

164 The desire to feel Indigenous, to commune with and become part of, the natural environment pulls powerfully upon the European imagination, however the term and its application is fraught. To begin with, it could be read as a form of continued colonial marginalisation of the Indigenous subject. That is, not content with consuming the Aboriginal people’s political, geographic and cultural space, the non-Indigenous population (by claiming their own special Indigenous relationship with the Australian landscape) now want to consume the remnants of Indigenous identity, their spiritual connection to the environment. Conversely, Ian McLean argues that:

Despite its imperial overtones, the concept of the ‘white Aborigine’ does figure a desire for some form of reconciliation, or even a threshold beyond which difference might be reinscribed into the double genealogy of the text ‘Australia’. The white Aborigine is a hybrid figure, in Australia at least; and it is one which impacts on Aborigines as much as it does on whites.18

While McLean is far from certain that reconciliation is about to eventuate in Australia anytime soon, nevertheless he seems to be suggesting that the notion of the white Aborigine does open up the potential for a future reconciliation as it articulates a hybrid space in which non-Indigenous inhabitants are better able to see/understand the Indigenous experience.

For McLean, the process of becoming Indigenous can be read as getting closer to an Aboriginal/Indigenous position rather than further away from it. Read this way, part of the attraction of Mick Dundee and Steve Irwin is that they seemingly express an uncomplicated, non-violent incarnation of white Aborigine; the version the European subject would like to be: a figure, if not of reconciliation, then at least of progress. Mick Taylor on the other hand expresses a type of hyper-demented white Aborigine; whose proximity to the environment has not brought with it any sense of psychic/emotional reconciliation for the non-Indigenous imagination. In this guise Taylor encompasses not so much the white Aborigine we would like to be, but the white Aborigine the European subject actually is.

18 Ian McLean, White Aborigines: Identity Politics in Australian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 126-127. 165 In this irreconcilable failure, Taylor calls forth the spectral form of another fictional desert entity, the character of Voss from Patrick White’s novel of the same name. Inspired by Ludwig Leichhardt’s failed expedition into outback Australia in 1848, White’s novel follows the character of Voss as he sets up and then undertakes a journey into Australia’s desert wilderness. Like the figure of Dawes in For The Term of His Natural Life, Voss’s journey is similarly structured around a descent into a landscape that is physically and emotionally alienating, a journey that ultimately ends in Voss’s death. However the character of Voss, unlike Dawes, is marked by an almost maniacal sense of self-belief and authority. Voss then journeys into Australia’s desert heart with the deluded intention of dominating and taming this environment. In this metaphysical sense Voss pits his will and masculinity against the desert, a battle of psychic forces that Voss believes will see him triumphantly re-born as a god. However in this test of wills it is the desert that remains resolutely unchangeable; it is the desert which tames and dominates Voss. Only at the end of the novel when he has physically and emotionally been stripped back to the bone and just before his death, does Voss come to see the arrogant delusion he earlier suffered from.19

It is only when he is killed and cannibalised by a group of Aboriginals that his transformation into a white Aborigine is complete. Through this random, ritual sacrifice Voss’ body dies but his spirit is reborn Indigenous. A process of transmogrification that White directly alludes to towards the end of the novel when the character of Judd, an ex-convict who had survived Voss’s expedition, offers that Voss - whether in spirit or body - is in fact still there, “in the country, and always will be.”20 Voss’s journey towards a form of white Aborigine is one that is marked by a gradual falling away and removal of his deluded desire to impose himself and his will upon the desert; a desire which at the start of the novel parallels the European delusion to impose narrative meaning and thereby control over the Australian environment. Voss’s murder represents a type of

19 Patrick White, Voss, 7th ed. (London: Eyre Spottiswoode, 1957; Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1972)

20 White, Voss, 394. 166 narrative death, the collapse of the signification located around European representation.

However if this ritual exchange is one that European Australia is metaphorically unwilling or unable to pay, perhaps this reluctance reveals not only a fear of turning towards narrative collapse/failure, but a fear that this is where we have always been and that the convict body, like the Aboriginal body, resides within a mode of signification outside the narrative coherence of European Modernity. This is a mode of spectral post- colonial Other which is displaced within a constellation of fragmented becomings and that can be traced within Australia’s cultural predisposition towards narrative failure. As Graeme Turner argues in National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative, the consistency with which narrative failure reappears across Australia’s creative landscape speaks to a cultural identity that continues to be influenced by the affective trauma of Australia’s convict history. Consequently, for Turner, the mechanisms of alienation, isolation and displacement associated with the convicts’ transportation and imprisonment “provides us with a central paradigm for the depiction of the self in Australian narrative.”21 The reproduction and performance of Australian identity is intimately structured around a sense of impotency in relation to the ideological inscription of hegemonic authority. An impotency, which in the gendered environment of Australia’s convicts history, articulates a narrative failure that spills out into the melancholic performance of Australian masculinity.

4.5 - Mr Nolan I presume?

In the context of Australian visual culture perhaps no artist has mined this sense of melancholic loss more than the artist/painter Sidney Nolan. From the theme of Gallipoli to the explorers Burke and Wills and the bushranger Ned Kelly, Nolan’s work repeatedly draws upon moments of European Australian history that are intimately structured around failure. During the second half of the twentieth century Nolan was regarded internationally as Australia’s pre-eminent artist. While today such an

21 Graeme Turner, National Fictions: Literature, Film and the Construction of Australian Narrative, 2nd ed. (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993), 60. All subsequent references refer to this edition.

167 assessment is open to debate, there is little doubt that Nolan’s artistic legacy continues to cast a long shadow across the Australian cultural landscape. This influence relates particularly to the Kelly series painted between 1946-47. Inspired by the figure of Ned Kelly and his gang of bushrangers, Nolan’s work ostensibly depicts the series of violent exchanges between Ned’s gang and the Victorian/New South Wales police that took place between 1878-80. Nolan then overlaid this historical framework with a type of mythic surreal space, in order to address a number of different aesthetic and conceptual preoccupations.

There are numerous ways to enter into a discussion of Nolan’s Kelly series, however some of the most well-worn relate to landscape, the private/personal dramas associated with his art patrons John and Sunday Reed, the source material of Ned Kelly himself or Nolan’s iconic representation of Kelly’s armour. While I shall be touching upon some of these approaches my focus is predominantly concerned with a gendered reading of Nolan’s Kelly and the interaction between violence, masculinity and patriarchy located within his paintings. For Nolan, the thematics of violence were a central preoccupation of the Kelly paintings. As he explained to Elwyn Lynn:

When I came out of the army in 1945, I was more than interested in violence. We had been taught about arms and the use of the utmost violence. Though you are trained to act in groups you remain an individual. You have been taught that your .303 rifle is your best friend and when you are on the end of it you become one with it, as an individual. I sought an individual like Kelly who, of course, worked with a gang, but was a real individual whose life was full of violence which was expiated at the end of a rope on 11 November 1880.22

In this statement Nolan describes a matrix of interactions between the individual and the collective predicated upon violence and directly related to the Kelly series. Thus we have Nolan referring to being trained in the art of violence and of being trained to use violent destructive weapons, to even see oneself as a weapon, and in being prepared to execute/perform that violence both as an individual and as a group. While the question of masculinity and its relationship to various modes of violence is not directly referred

22 Nancy Underhill, ed., Nolan on Nolan: Sidney Nolan in his own words, edited by Nancy Underhill, (Melbourne: Penguin Books, 2007), 268. 168 to; by locating these violent activities within the traditionally masculine domains of the army and Kelly’s gang, Nolan indirectly foregrounds its thematic importance to the work.

Significantly, Nolan’s description of the relationship between the rifle and the soldier and of being taught that your rifle is “your best friend and when you are on the end of it you become one with it,”23 can be read as analogous to the mechanics of Patriarchal ideology. That is, like soldiers in an army, men in society are trained to conform to and reproduce a certain performance of masculinity, one in which male identity is conflated with the phallic signification of the penis/rifle. This is a process of social interpellation and personal projection that is predicated upon narratives of phallic power, violence and authority as well as mechanisms of collective surveillance. In this way the heterosexual male subject exists within a sadomasochistic regime, simultaneously gazing upon and policing other heterosexual men while at the same time submitting to the heterosexual gaze of other men.

In the context of the Kelly paintings, the violence of Patriarchal interpellation is triangulated between the figure of Kelly, the police, and the scopic gaze. Throughout the series, eyes (or the lack of eyes) represent both the process of seeing and not-seeing, of recognition and misrecognition. Vision in this sense is intimately associated with a range of censored and un-censored desires, desires structured around a fetishised coveting of phallic power. Vision in the Kelly paintings attests to both a desire for phallic agency and the simultaneous fear of its absence. This form of scopic uncertainty speaks to a sense of castration and failure located not only around the performance of Australian masculinity, but more broadly speaking, around the reproduction of Australian European memory/identity.

Turning to the series itself, perhaps one of the most striking images to address this relationship between landscape, surveillance and masculinity is the painting titled Ned Kelly from 1946 (Figure 11). In this work the figure of Kelly dressed in his black

23 Ibid., 272. 169 armour is depicted riding away on his horse. Back turned to the viewer, Kelly and the horse occupy the vertical centre of the picture, while the horizon line almost cuts the picture plane directly in half. Astride his horse the figure of Kelly occupies both the sparse barren earth of the foreground and the sky blue expansiveness of the background. Suited up in his armour, Kelly in his black squared helmet stands in sharp contrast to the surrounding environment. A sense of contrast is emphasised all the more by the absences of eyes in his helmet. While, for art critic T.G. Rosenthal, the silhouette in this painting endows Kelly with a quality of invincibility24, I would argue that the absence of eyes in conjunction with the openness of the landscape convey not so much a sense of power but rather one of loss and isolation. Devoid of any marker of humanity, Kelly- as-automaton seems as alienated and lost from himself as he is from the surrounding environment.

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS

Figure 11. Sidney Nolan, Ned Kelly, 1946. Ripolin enamel on hardboard, 90.5 x 121.3cm. National Gallery of Australia.

24 T.G. Rosenthal, Sidney Nolan (London: Thames & Hudson, 2002), 64.

170 In an interview he gave to Anne Kelleher in 1987, Nolan referred to this image as the central painting in the series, remarking that:

It was the only one I needed to do. It was the one invention. Strangely I was looking at a picture of it last night. I’d never thought of it before but I suddenly saw that it’s about being very lonely. I’d always see it as old Ned Kelly on his horse from the back. But last night I saw it as a terribly lonely image.25

Nolan’s comment regarding the terrible loneliness of Kelly points to a sense of melancholic alienation not only between the landscape and the figure but also between Kelly and his own masculinity.

Kelly’s suit and particularly his eyeless helmet in the painting Ned Kelly, simultaneously signifies both the presence and the absence of a body. Kelly’s metal suit on the one hand can be read as a robotic automaton devoid of humanity, the empty shell as it were of patriarchy. At the same time the form of the suit also implies the presence of a body, the presence of Kelly and, by extension, the presence of masculinity. In this sense masculinity, whether in the guise of Ned Kelly, or for that matter Voss, Mick Taylor, Brett Sprague or Alexander Pearce, is a mimetic performance that lies on the surface of the male body, like an ill-worn disguise; a disguise that is rudimentarily bolted together in a fetishistic attempt to display the appropriate attributes associated with male authority and power.

Viewed through this lens just who inhabits the position of hegemonic authority in Nolan’s Kelly series is unclear. Certainly Ned Kelly is the outlaw on the run from the police, yet Nolan endows many of the individual scenes with a lyrical Keystone cops/ Kafkaesque sensibility; as a result in the paintings from this series it seems as though Kelly is hunting the police as much as they are hunting Kelly. Both Ned and the police are collectively in pursuit and at the same time pursued by the spectral form of the convict, whose monstrous presence threatens the narrative reticulation of Australian masculinity and national identity. No one is actually in a position of authority in relation

25 Underhill, Nolan on Nolan, 272.

171 to hegemonic masculinity. Instead everyone from Kelly’s gang to Ned himself and the police are performing around/through the ideology of masculinity. In this absurd pantomime, the police like Kelly wear their authority and their masculinity as a form of drag, or costume, a performance they put on in order to be socially recognised; but one whose very theatricality/performativity and mimetic excess, threatens to destablise the ideological formulation of the unified subject. Thus the ambiguity of power/authority between Ned and the police spills over into the ambiguity around Australian masculinity itself.

Like the figure of Mick Taylor from Wolf Creek, Nolan’s Ned Kelly subsequently encompasses both qualities of agency as well as its lack. Like some demonic Patriarchal monster Ned haunts the established performance of European Australian masculinity, questioning not only its authority but also its very validity. Ned’s monstrous form presents as a type of metaphysical boundary rider located as much within the police as outside of them. What Nolan’s Kelly series depicts is the attempt on the part of the police to apprehend and destroy their own deviant/criminal performance of masculinity; to expunge any vestige of spectral contaminated masculinity associated with the convict form. Kelly’s suit of armour, on one level signifies both the fragility of meaning and masculinity that haunts Australian European identity, and at the same time the ongoing misrecognition/desire on the part of European Australians to find some accord with the surrounding environment. Kelly like the character of Voss and Mick Taylor, presents as a form of white Aborigine, roaming around the bush in search of his identity and his lost masculinity; trying to extract some kind of recognition from the landscape, an acknowledgment of self that is continually refused.

Kelly’s suit suggests a type of demented mechanical blackface, a white Indigenous performance ludicrously structured around a farcical pretence that underscores the desperate desire on the part of the European Australian imagination to replace/erase the Indigenous population. Nolan’s Kelly paintings are intimately concerned with European Australia’s continued melancholic uncertainty with the

172 mimetic repetition of our national and gendered identity. This mimetic uncertainty in turn feeds into our desperate desire to manufacture some sort of metaphysical transcendental point of origin by dressing up or masquerading as white Aborigines.

If in the end such desires fail to be realised, this is a failure born of a multitude of misreadings. If we return to the film Wolf Creek, the visage of Mick Taylor re-imagined as an amalgam of Voss and Ned Kelly, points to a type of spectral misrecognition or failure on the part of the white Aborigine to project narrative meaning onto the environment. Taylor’s psychotic, violent behaviour attests to a type of hysterical avenging Voss/Kelly, a white convict Aborigine, who functions as both the subject of this cultural inability to incorporate the Australian environment into a sense of self, while at the same time also embodying the object or force of this narrative chaos. Taylor is both the victim and the agent of non-meaning. For Paul Carter, the European inability to see the Australian landscape as it is, or rather the failure to unify desire with place, has from the very beginning of European exploration generated a matrix of misunderstandings and misrecognitions which overrun the journals of those who ventured out into the Australian wilderness. As Carter writes:

Far from projecting themselves into the future through carefully deliberated plans of action, the explorer-writers describe a steady-state of conflicting loyalties, lines of reasoning, fears and physical frailties which lead to inaction as well as action. Their narratives do not proceed smoothly towards the longed-for denouement of an island sea or a navigable river, but consist of a multitude of fragmentary asides, speculative observations, scraps of dialogue, reminiscences which struggle inconclusively for definition and dominance. Anasto-mosing narratives that fan out inconclusively as they proceed, they strangely resemble the country they describe.26

For Carter, such journal entries highlight a reciprocal relationship between language and environment, a confusion of space and landscape that spills over into its linguistic description. Yet in another sense such entries also resemble a topographic landscape of alterity in which the figure of the convict, the Indigenous population and the environment reside within an ongoing reproduction of mimetic misrecognition.

26 Paul Carter, Living in a New Country: History, Travelling and Language (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), 27. 173 4.6 – Heads or tales

Taking Nolan’s depiction of Kelly’s armour is the starting part for a discussion of my own aesthetic exploration of mimetic misrecognition. I’d like to address the issues of representation, identity, and mimes in relation to a body of my work collectively titled the Convict Death Head series. The series is made up of sixteen semi-abstract heads constructed from plywood. The rectangular heads measuring approximately 40cm x 25cm x 30cm each, depict a rudimentally fashioned convict face. For instance in Convict Death Head ­­/1 (Figure 12) the convict’s vacant black eyes stare out from a pink coloured face, his yellow mouth opened in an aggressive, defiant snarl. In the context of Nolan’s armoured Kelly, Convict Death Head /1 can be read as Kelly’s missing head transported out from under the helmet; a re-configuration of Kelly’s death mask with the castrated/ spectral remains of convict masculinity.

Figure 12. Shannon Field, Convict Death Head / 1, 2011-12. Mixed media on plywood, 40 x 25 x 30cm. Property of the artist.

Underscoring this reading is the construction of the heads themsleves. The rectangular format evokes both the physicality of the features residing on the surface of each box, while at the same time also speaking to the empty space within the head itself. As the convict death heads hang on the wall, the pronounced space from the front of the

174 face to the back of the head in turn emphasises their material discreetness or separation from the body. These spectral fragments thus allude to a number of interrelated concerns and discourses circulating around and through the cultural construction of the head and face. Of particular interest is the conflation of the anatomical head/face with various political entities ranging from the ‘head of State’, or the ‘head of the nation’, to the ‘head of the family’ and more recently the ‘head of a corporation’. This conflation between the physical head and the political head speaks to a semiotic exchange in which the anatomical significance or aura attributed to the head and face has symbolically come to define the social and political importance associated with those in power. Circulating around the anatomical hand and the political head is a fetishised reification of agency that accords each a central place in both the cultural reproduction of modernity and the material expansion of European colonialism.

Within this formulation of the head/face is an understanding that as a physical object and a political entity, both operate in relation to a body, and that the power or agency of the former is most clearly marked out by control over the latter. Conversely, to lose control is referred to colloquially as ‘losing your head’, or ‘losing face’, a situation that implies not only the external loss of social or political agency but also a parallel lack of internal emotional control over the narration of meaning. The convict death head then intersects through both the possibility and impossibility of meaning. However in a Benjaminian context the representation of the death’s head as meaningless is not the end point in the discussion, but rather the starting point, in an allegorical critique of representation and history. As Benjamin contends in The Origin of German tragic Drama:

Everything about history, that from the very beginning has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face - or rather in a death’s head…This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline. The greater the significance, the greater the subjection to death, because death digs most deeply the jagged line of demarcation between physical nature and significance. But if nature has always been subject to the power of death, it is also true that it has always been allegorical.27

27 Benjamin, The Origin of German, 166. 175 For Benjamin the allegorical force of the death’s head relates to the manner in which the ruined form of the head, hollowed out by death, demonstrates the point of rupture between the physical object and what Benjamin refers to as its significance or what we might refer to as signification. It is at this point when the object, the death’s head presents as inanimate that the linguistic and cultural meanings previously attributed to its living form reveal themsleves as socially constructed projections. Thus like so much skin and hair, the semiotic codification of the object falls away to reveal the organic non-matter, the non-meaning that lies beneath the construction of all representation, and in particular, the representation of history.

Framed this way, the allegorical ruin is one of the defining mechanisms that Benjamin calls upon to address questions specifically related to the representation of history. Commensurate with this process, the allegorical image thus presents as a type of dialectical image. As film and cultural theorist Therese Davis writes in The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition and Spectatorship:

For Benjamin, the baroque emblem of the death’s head is a dialectic image. It can be read as the mortification of human life, but it is also an image of ‘nature in decay’ – nature’s subjection to the power of death. To see allegorically, he argues, is to see the imprint of history, to see how history survives in the world of dead or discarded things.28

For Davis the allegorical ruin of the death’s head thus functions like a dialectical image, rupturing the universal formulation of history. The death’s head then disturbs the linear conceptualisation of history with its ruinous visage of death/non-meaning and in the process opening history up to a constellation of marginalised ruins and discarded fragments.

Returning then to Convict Death Head /1, the demarcated displacement of the head in conjunction with its overt clunky construction speaks to an historical dissonance located around the performance and representation of both our national identity as well the gendered identity of masculinity. As markers of death, the convict heads point to the

28 Therese Davis, The Face on the Screen: Death, Recognition and Spectatorship (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books, 2004), 53. 176 meaningless chaos of non-signification that is European Australia’s foundation moment. Grouped together on the wall, one might imagine the sixteen heads as Mick Taylor’s hunting trophies, souvenirs from his tourist cull. Perhaps then Convict Death Head /1 isn’t so much snarling at us, but instead is trying to speak from the grave - trying to communicate from the past. Or perhaps he is trying to do both, but nothing comes out; his mouth frozen in miscomprehension and refusing to utter any words of warning, recrimination, or desire. In this sense the trauma of his/our Gothic past has hollowed out any narrative meaning, leaving behind an empty death’s head, whose constituent parts - eyes, nose, mouth and ears - evoke a fractured heterosexual masculinity that clings mimetically to the surface of the face.

The mimetic repetition located between and across these death’s heads foregrounds a type of hysterical convict hyper-performance, in which one face, one mode of masculinity after another, is tried on and performed in a desperate attempt to discover the authentic ideological representation of hegemonic masculinity. Like Nolan’s Kelly, these convict death’s heads vacillate between meaning and non-meaning, representation and death, in the process repetitively turning over the reproduction of gender, landscape and narrative.

4.7 - The ragman

In the context of Wolf Creek the mimetic representation of masculinity speaks to a gendered condition that is inherently fractured and unstable. Like so much discarded trash, the fragmented remains collected by Mick Taylor allude to Walter Benjamin’s ragpicker. Associated with nineteenth-century industrialisation, the ragpicker was an urban figure who sorted through people’s garbage, gathering up, collecting and recycling objects and items that could be re-fashioned into new and different points of exchange and in this way pressed back into economic service. Located at the fringes of society, the ragpicker for Benjamin became both a powerful metaphor of the material marginalisation at work within industrialisation, history and identity, while at the same time embodying a monad of heterogeneity, a performative force of insurgent difference

177 randomly navigating its way through the archaeological ruins of the present.

The ragpicker’s liminal position in society - expressed by working late at night or early in the morning, collecting and recycling industrial/commercial waste, drinking excessively and behaving aggressively towards those in positions of authority - consequently gave the ragpicker a romantic revolutionary aura. In this sense Benjamin regarded the ragpicker’s performance as giving a form of resistance to the phantasmagoria of industrial Modernity. Understood this way, the figure of the ragpicker gave political force to the marginalised form. However this mode of representation has been criticised as problematically fetishising the power of poverty. As Carlo Salzani argues in Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality, for Benjamin and other bourgeois intellectuals such as Baudelaire:

The ragpicker remained always the other and, as such, was played into their narratives as sign and not given a voice. The emphasis on waste as repository of historical truth, the necessity of a violent, destructive interruption of the monolithic and excluding bourgeois phantasmagoria and, most of all, a constructive methodology based on the assemblage of lost and forgotten fragments gathered from the trash of society, are the features of a philosophy of history we could rename the “theory of the ragpicker.”29

For Carlo Salzani then the significance today of Benjamin’s theory of the ragpicker lies not in the fetishisation of a redemptive political poverty but rather as a methodological process located within a range of historiographical practices and post-colonial discourses.30

In this historiographical context, the character of Mick Taylor can in one sense be read as a type of inverted, anti-hero ragpicker, an evil, destructive figure gathering up and sorting through the lost, misguided remains of unsuspecting tourist who happens to cross his path. However, at the same time the figure of Taylor also embodies a much more extensive ragpicker regime, one associated with the reproduction of Australian masculinity and national identity. In relation to the film, these ragpicker thematics

29 Carlo Salzani, Constellations of Reading: Walter Benjamin in Figures of Actuality, Cultural History And Literary Imagination, vol. 13 (Bern: Peter Lang AG, International Publishers, 2009), 188.

30 Salzani, Constellations of Reading, 189. 178 are established around the mise en scène of Taylor’s compound. Made up of various recycled materials, and littered with a multitude of discarded objects, Mick’s compound looks likes a junkyard full of recycled paraphernalia. Within the context of Wolf Creek’s narrative arc, the compound thus signifies both the recuperative resourcefulness of Taylor, his ragpicker ability to recycle and re-appropriate discarded materials, but also an emblematic site of death, a graveyard overrun by abandoned spare-parts wasting away in the elements and the skeletal remains of so many murdered tourists.

Under the cover of darkness the full horror of Taylor’s compound is deliberately obscured, the three tourists arrive believing that Mick will quickly fix their car and they’ll be on their way. At this point the tone in the film shifts decidedly towards the sinister. The tourists, particularly Liz Hunter, sense that something is not quite right. However all three are unaware of just how dangerous Mick actually is. In this sense the compound is like some enormous Gothic spider’s web, or venus flytrap that claustrophobically closes in around them as they drift away into a drug-induced sleep. The film then fades to black, signifying not only their descent into unconsciousness, but also the moment the film transitions from road movie to horror movie. It is at this juncture that both the audience and the characters enter the film proper, and the abject horror of the compound and its sense of material decay and death is revealed through the eyes of Liz, whose character acts as a counter point to Taylor.

Liz wakes up in a small shed with her hands and feet tied together and her mouth gagged. Looking through a window she sees that their car has been pulled apart and their personal belongings, sleeping bags, food and clothing strewn across the ground. Though Liz eventually manages to escape with her companion Kristy Earl, she ventures back to Taylor’s compound to try and rescue Ben. It is at this point when Liz makes her way through a large shed full of cars that the full extent of Mick’s homicidal behaviour becomes clear. She sees that this is not an isolated incident; Mick has been collecting tourists for a long time. It is a horrifying prospect, underscored when Liz enters a room full of tourist’s personal mementos: their photos, letters, and passports pinned to a

179 wall. Even more disturbing is a box full of tourist’s video cameras. Turning one on, Liz watches mortified as the same events leading up to their own terrifying situation are repeated before her eyes, events involving not only adults but in this case also a young child. In this moment the Gothic monstrosity of Taylor’s character is fully realised in both its barbaric, inhumanity, and its predatory, orchestrated, sadism. Thus Liz’s movement through Taylor’s compound, like the characters of Voss and Dawes, embodies a descent into the Gothic destructive darkness of Australian masculinity; a darkness all the more disturbing for the complete indexical loss of these tourists.

The loss associated with this cache of photos and video is particularly haunting not only because it figuratively codifies the death of so many people and families but also because it marks the cessation of so many moments of joy, love, and hope that have been encoded and then lost within these digital devices. The mediated remains of the murdered tourists generate a form of indexical displacement that mirrors the haunted marginalisation of Australian European identity and masculinity. All of us, as bearers of European culture are lost in a sense in the Gothic wilderness of the Australian desert. The individual characters in Wolf Creek embody a single allegorical performance. Taylor’s compound, its location in the central desert of Australia (symbolically the heart of the nation), along with the ragpicker environment of decaying waste, metaphorically locates the European reproduction of Australian identity around the figure of the scavenger, navigating her/his way through the trash yard of history. As cultural theorist Marita Bullock writes in Memory Fragments: Visualising Difference in Australian History:

Trash is a highly useful metaphor for representing Australia’s imbrication with other nations because it operates metonymically for Australia’s identity as an outpost of the British Empire. Australia was ‘founded’ as Britain’s dumping ground, so to speak, and has often been conceived, since colonisation as a ‘wasteland’… Trash rests at the very helm of Australian modernity, and is therefore too imbricated in the foundations of the culture and the nation to be regarded as something out of place or easily denigrated. … [It] is a player in the ongoing formation of Australian modernity and its aesthetics. It is the material through which the national imaginary is galvanised and corroded.31

31 Marita Bullock, Memory Fragments: Visualising Difference in Australian History (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2012), 17-18. 180 Australian identity then, is constructed around a form of discursive scavenging in which the reproduction of culture is mediated through and formulated around the collection of trash; a material process that aesthetically folds out into the politics of melancholic cannibalism. Taylor’s murder of the tourists is a form of self-consumption, a process, that when applied to Australian culture, points to the manner in which Australian identity replicates and survives by continually devouring itself. In searching for a sense of narrative coherence within the intestinal remains, the fragments of meaning are scattered across the landscape of our national imagination. The European inhabitants of Australia stumble about the landscapes of suburbia, the bush, the beach, and the desert, blindly searching for a sense of coherent meaning, a mode of narrative definition that relentlessly drives us on but is never actually found; in this sense no point of destination is reached and thus no semiotic closure realised.

4.8 - Let’s talk video

In the context of Australian visual art this intersection between repetition, landscape and masculinity subsequently allows for a productive discussion of the work of Australian artist Shaun Gladwell. Though Gladwell was trained during the 1990s as a painter he is perhaps best known for his video/photo-media work. Notable for their deliberately slowed, attenuated pace these video pieces display three recurring themes. First of all, there is an ongoing preoccupation with the human body. Secondly, there is a heightened representation of movement. And thirdly, there is a performance and documentation of peripheral social activities associated with youth culture, particularly skateboarding, BMX bike riding, break dancing and graffiti spray painting. Given Gladwell’s interest in the kinetic properties of the body it should come as little surprise that much of the critical response to his work has concerned itself with issues related to spatial performance. All of these forms of analysis provide legitimate avenues into Gladwell’s work. However underscoring much of this discussion is a certain reticence to locate his work within a psychological framework. Indeed, Dr Rex Butler in the catalogue essay for Maddest Maximus pointedly states that, “Gladwell is not interested

181 in … psychodramas. Rather his relationship to the landscape is totally exteriorised, functional, relational. It is not a story of resistance and eventual mastery he is interested in narrating, but one of cooperation, mutuality and care.”32 For Rex Butler, Shaun’s work stands in direct contrast to the likes of Patrick Whites novel Voss with its focus upon questions of psychological interiority.

However, in the context of this thesis it is precisely the psychological relationship between exteriority and interiority that is of most interest. Focussing upon Gladwell’s Maddest Maximus series, the gender/psychoanalytic possibilities in his practice are unpacked around the question of blackface representation. Unfolding against the grain, this counter-reading of Gladwell’s work looks not to the performativity of space and movement but instead to the performativity of dress/clothing.

First exhibited in the Sherman Galleries in 2007, the work in Maddest Maximus involves a series of videos depicting the figure of Gladwell dressed in black motorcycle leathers riding and moving through the outback desert landscape near Broken Hill. In title, location and clothing, Gladwell’s series directly references the Mad Max trilogy of films, in particular, the second film released in 1981 known as Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. The central narrative of the Mad Max trilogy is structured around police officer Max Rockatansky’s progression or descent through the dystopian (though still recognisable) world of the first film, into the apocalyptic and then post-apocalyptic dreamscapes of the second and third films. Set some time in the future, the exact reason for this turn of events is never actually provided. All that is made clear is that, as the veneer of civilisation falls away, the remnants of humanity coalesce into various tribal groups battling with one another for control over the remaining sources of fuel.33

In drawing upon the key mise en scène elements of Mad Max, Gladwell’s series undoubtedly shares a number of similar thematic themes/tropes; yet just as clearly,

32 Rex Butler, “Sprezzatura,” Exhibition essay for Maddest Maximus, Shaun Galdwell (Sydney: Sherman Galleries, 2007).

33 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior, directed by George Miller (Australia: Kennedy Miller Productions, 1981). 182 there are significant personal, technical and artistic differences between his work and the Mad Max films. Certainly Gladwell’s gentle, almost mediative performance of Max deliberately stands in stark contrast to the violently frenetic, cinematic realisation of Mad Max. However my interest here isn’t in the representation of the known or the

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS

Figure 13. Shaun Gladwell, “Apology to roadkill: Daydream Mine Road,” 2007. Type-C print, 120 x 120 cm. Macquarie Group Collection.

intended but rather the unknown. For this reason my gaze turns to the question of masquerade and specifically the unintended consequences for Gladwell of incorporating Mad Max’s outfit, of dressing up in his clothing.

In the photograph “Apology to roadkill: Daydream Mine Road” (Figure 13), Gladwell is depicted standing and walking along a dirt road. With his back turned to the viewer, he gently cradles a dead kangaroo in his arms. For Felicity Fenner, the chief curator of National Institute of Experimental Arts (NIEA) at UNSW Galleries, College of Fine Art (COFA), this act of compassion stands in stark contrast to previous formulations of European Australian identity that in the past have been built around a violent inscription of masculinity upon the environment.

183 At the same time Felicity Fenner suggests that the title and its political timing in turn link the work to the Australian Government’s 2008 apology to Australia’s Indigenous people.34 Gladwell’s actions could be read as a type of mourning, in which the European subject grieves for the violence that has been inflicted upon both the Indigenous peoples and the natural environment, and seeks atonement for these past transgressions by re-entering and engaging anew with these Indigenous spaces. As Felicity Fenner writes, Gladwell replaces “menace with meditation, and cruelty with empathy.” 35 In an aesthetic sense, the empathy and mediative stillness that Fenner picks up on in Gladwell’s practice is powerfully conveyed through the seamlessness in the work. The seamlessness speaks in an ideological sense to a smoothing-out of any glitches, the fault lines or stutterings that might threaten the illusion of homogeneity. However in my reading of Gladwell’s work, the violence embedded within the mimetic representation of identity is still there to be found, its presence felt within the materiality of the costume itself.

Dressed like Mad Max, Gladwell’s black outfit reads like a suit of ill-fitting armour, which, particularly in relation to the leather jacket, buckles and crumples around his body. Gladwell tries to accessorise the tropes of violence and dysfunction associated with Max’s masculinity and reconfigure them for his own purposes; but as a mode of dress as a form of masquerade, these tropes refuse to conform smoothly or neatly to his representation of Australian masculinity. In an allegorical sense, the leather jacket speaks to a body politic in conflict with itself, a form of masculinity that sits uncomfortably in its surroundings and its dress. The spectre of European Australia’s displaced past and the spectre of convict masculinity has re-materialised within Gladwell’s outfit. The trope of masculinity exists not within Gladwell himself, but rather on the surface. This is where the psychodrama, the trauma of Australia’s convict past is

34 Felicity Fenner, “Shaun Gladwell,” in The Macquarie Group Collection: The Land And Its Psyche, co-authored Julian Beaumont, Felicity Fenner, John McDonald (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2012), 84.

35 Ibid., 84 184 to be found, and where the reproduction of Australian’s deviant masculinity continues to be felt and performed. It is in this space between Gladwell’s body and Max’s costume that the ideological violence related to masculinity unfolds; a process of repetitious inversion that is analogous to European Australia’s ongoing relationship with the space and the landscape of Australia.

In this way the European imagination is stretched like a thin veneer across the continent, a membrane of transparent uncertainty that is attached to the past, the landscape, and ourselves. Everything resides on the surface; there is no historical, psychological or cultural depth. And yet paradoxically it is this very lack of narrative depth that inflames our ongoing cultural preoccupation with mythologies of space and distance. Our continued search for narrative meaning is intimately tied to our desire to formulate or lay down a point of origin to the story of who we are, both as a nation and as individuals. That we have failed to adequately establish the former directly extends out from the problematics of the latter. Ironically, it is not the particularities of the Australian environment, the politics of distance nor our European heritage which block our emotional/psychological integration with the landscape and ourselves, but rather the misrecognition, or perhaps more accurately, the confabulation around our European point of origin.

The figure of Gladwell then as depicted in “Apology to roadkill: Daydream Mine Road,” is only able to move through this confabulated space encased in his protective armour, a streetwise space suit that directly and indirectly references Nolan’s Ned Kelly. Shaun in a video interview with Dr. Christian Messham-Muir for StudioCrasher, remarks upon the importance of Nolan’s practice to his own, observing that he is both

“obsessed” and “haunted” by Nolan’s Kelly series.36 However in the Maddest Maximus series this interest in Nolan’s Kelly arguably extends beyond admiration and becomes

36 Shaun Gladwell, “Part 1: Interview with Shaun Gladwell, Venice 2013,” interviewed by Christian Messham-Muir, StudioCrasher, last accessed August 12, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/user/ StudioCrasher.

185 a direct point of reference. Many of the same ideological mechanisms located within Nolan’s depiction of Kelly spill over into Gladwell’s re-formulation of Max as Kelly as Nolan, in a sequence of masquerades that eventually links both artists’ work to the question of blackface representation. It is not my contention here that either Nolan or Gladwell have consciously drawn upon the cultural racism of the blackface minstrel tradition, but that they have nevertheless unconsciously constructed a type of blackface motif that functions as a form of masculine masquerade. The assertion here is that Nolan and Gladwell have unknowingly tapped into an established tradition of blackface representation in Australia, a tradition that importantly leads us back to the figure of Ned Kelly and the Kelly gang.

4.9 - Minstrel Kelly, Minstrel Max

In a journal article titled, “Leary Kin: Australian Larrikins and the Blackface Minstrel Dandy,” Dr Melissa Bellanta explores the development of the larrikin figure in Australia during the 1870s to the 1880s, and the relationship between the larrikin, blackface minstrelsy and the Kelly gang. According to Dr Bellanta, the term larrikin referred to a specific group of poor working class youth, predominately of Irish heritage. These street youths, both male and female, disdained all forms of official authority and were often involved in violent anti-social behaviour. In line with this penchant for violence, disorder and lewd behaviour, the larrikins saw in the blackface minstrel show a mode of entertainment that reflected their own violent lives. Within the larrikin community the popularity of minstrel shows was such that certain blackface dance moves and slang were eventually accommodated into the larrikins’ own performance.37 Around this discussion Dr Bellanta locates Ned Kelly and his gang as a type of uber- larrikin, a discursive touchstone that illustrates the complex interaction between masculinity, the marginalised subject, and authority. The parallels between the Kelly gang and blackface minstrelsy are multifaceted. To begin with, as Dr Bellanta notes:

37 Melissa Bellanta, “Leary Kin: Australian Larrikins and the Blackface Minstrel Dandy,” Journal of Social History 42, no.3 (Spring 2009): 677-679, doi: 10.1353/jsh.0.0175.

186 Newspaper coverage of the Kelly gang during their wild ride in the late seventies was rife with images of blackness. For some, they were “more cowardly than the wild blacks” who speared sleeping travellers as they lay. For others, they were wilier at bushcraft than the black trackers sent to hunt them down. Not surprisingly, the same association between blackness and larrikinism also prevailed in this period. By the mid-1880s, larrikinism had become synonymous with assaults in midnight alleyways, and with a series of pack rapes of white women.38

The discursive language around both the Kelly gang and the broader larrikin community formulates a mode of blackness in which race, class and gender is conflated with criminality. In this light the representation of larrikin masculinity, particularly in relation to those of Irish decent is constructed around a form of monstrous deviancy that closely aligns itself with the performance of convict masculinity and dress.

However, this is not the full extent of the relationship between the Kelly gang and blackface theatre. After the eventual capture, trial and death of Ned Kelly, stage plays based upon the dramatic events began appearing, many of which were performed in blackface. As Dr Bellanta writes, one such drama performed in 1879 was the farce Catching the Kellys, a theatrical production in which “the black trackers sent to hunt the Kellys were played by white actors with blacked faces, minstrel – style …[and, it]…must have seemed fitting when Kelly plays involved “coon” dances in later years, and when white children blacked their faces to play Ned Kelly in bushranger games.”39 Both the reception and representation of Kelly’s larrikin masculinity is reproduced twice around blackface minstrelsy; the first time is through the Kelly gang’s actualisation of their material/social identity and the second time is through the biographic theatrics of the stage. As a result, a type of blackface performativity circulates around the Kelly gang from its very inception, one that is central to an understanding of their marginalised masculinity.

38 Ibid., 679.

39 Ibid.

187 Drawing upon Dr Bellanta’s reading of the Kelly gang, it is aesthetically and ideologically only a short step between her description of children blackening their faces like Ned Kelly, to Nolan and Gladwell’s formulations of the Kelly figure; both of whom in a material sense metaphorically replicate this process of blackface through the Kelly helmet. Again it is not my intention to cast their work within a racist framework but instead to link their figuration of Kelly to that of the white Aborigine. In this context, Nolan and Gladwell’s unconscious rendering of Kelly in blackface can be read as a type of suiting-up, in which the figure of European masculinity needs to be protectively sealed within a metaphoric spacesuit in order to inhabit and move through the Australian landscape. Nolan and Gladwell’s blackface Kelly speaks of the ongoing

European desire to appropriate the appearance of the Indigenous form, in order to interact with an environment that refuses to recognise the European subject. Situated within this collective context, the acquisition of the blackface suit points not only to a violent cannibalistic desire on the part of the European imagination to consume and replace the Aborigines, but at the same time, the impossibility of achieving such assimilation. In effect, there is always a gap or space that refuses to close between the suit and the subject.

However blackface identification in Australia resonates as much around questions of masculinity as it does around questions of race, as Dr Bellanta writes:

Australian larrikins were especially drawn to blackface dandies, and that they related these figures both to otherdandies on the popular stage and to the long tradition of Anglo-Celtic outlaw-heroes. Larrikins were primarily attracted to these figures out of a desire to align themselves with a dissolute masculinity rather than a class-bound identity. They drew on the lyrics and style of minstrel swells to elaborate an image of swashbuckling machismo, tricked out with the hard glamour of a Ned Kelly or Newgate anti-hero.40

If, as Dr Bellanta contends, the larrikin performance of blackface masculinity was ultimately structured around an acceptance rather than a rejection of the attitudes embedded within discourses of race; the politics of this racism, and the consciousness

40 Ibid., 690. 188 with which it was presumed underscores the degree to which blackface minstrelsy was also tied to the fractured formulation of Anglo masculinity.41 Seen through this gendered lens, the fragility of European Australian masculinity both then and now necessitates a performative masquerade in order to function. Thus through a type of cultural slight of hand the fragments of our convict past, our fractured masculinity have been displaced onto and camouflaged within the spectral form of the Indigenous Other.

Consequently the spectre of convict masculinity and the force with which it continues to haunt the European imagination relates directly to this ongoing misrecognition and displacement of our monstrous origins. Thus as Gladwell rides on his bike as Max/Kelly in “Approach to Mundi Mundi” and Nolan’s Kelly rides off into the distance, the ideological formulation of masculinity is not located out in the vista/ space of the landscape but within the clothing on their backs and their black helmets. As such the convict ghost isn’t so much in the machine as in their sartorial suits of armour. The appropriation of these monstrous textiles by the European Australian male along with the tropes of deviancy and lack associated with the performance of blackface offer up a glimpse of the fragments of convict masculinity which we have so desperately tried to toss aside; but stubbornly/resolutely refuse to disappear. Indeed they are impossible to lose, as they comprise the same rags used to drag and inhabit the Other as blackface dandy/white Aborigine. The figure of Gladwell as Max/Kelly, like the spectral entities of Brett Sprague, Alexander Pearce and Mick Taylor, attempts to formulate a univocal mode of heterosexual masculinity by scavenging together so many different scattered remains. For every piece of identity/masculinity they accrue and stitch into themselves, another piece unknowingly falls off, infected with the pathological trauma of convict masculinity.

4.10 – The boulevard of broken dreams

In my practice the dissonant relationship between European masculinity, colonialism, and the Australian landscape is repeatedly addressed through a form of

41 Ibid. 189 textility. This aesthetic approach looks to open up a dialectical doorway or avenue between the material and spectral worlds. It is one that formulates the productive exchange between text as concept and text(tile) as practice. In effect my work performs and channels a type of liminal spectrology that is utilised to both haunt and problematise the mimetic representation of identity and history. As a visual technique this spectral approach is particularly evident in a suite of drawings entitled Give My Regards to Broadway: Fragments of a Lost Convict. Comprising five individual landscape scenes, each image is predominately drawn with oil pastel over an enamel black background.

In Give My Regards to Broadway: Fragments of a Lost Convict (part 1) (Figure 14), a decapitated convict is depicted in mid-flight running headless through the bush. In this image the convict is ensconced within a semi-abstract environment consisting of a bolder-like shape that sits towards the front left of the image, a large cave in the middle and interspersed between three large tree trunks. The dissonant tension in this drawing is located around the juxtaposition between the spatial continuity of the landscape and the material representation of the convict. As with the other images in this series, the spatial clash in Give My Regards to Broadway (part 1) is generated through the abrupt, almost violent, displacement between the two zones of representation. There is no subtle or seamless integration here. Rather the convict figure is rendered upon a sparse white scrap of paper that has been awkwardly inserted into the landscape. This disjuncture is amplified not only by the contrast between the black of the ground with the white of the figure, but also by the ripped edges around the white scrap of paper as well. The tension between these two fields of signification thus speaks to a convict form that has been displaced from not only the surrounding environment, but also from its own masculinity. Like some form of temporal displacement, the montaged space around the convict evokes a sense of linear disruption related not only to space but also to time. The headless convict is simultaneously lost and on-the-run, a fugitive from himself, searching for a head and for a mode of communication and meaning that is beyond him.

190 Figure 14. Shannon Field, Give My Regards to Broadway: Fragments of a Lost Convict (part 1), 2012. Spray paint, oil pastel, collage on paper, 42 x 59cm. Property of the artist.

Still, perhaps it isn’t beyond him as much as he doesn’t want to find or remember the grotesque convict masculinity that he is desperately trying to distance himself from. In this scenario the headless convict is headless precisely so as not to remember that it is his own masculinity that is so troublesome. This is the cultural trauma of un- remembrance, of being haunted by the half-forgotten thing that is our colonial past. In this trance-like state our cultural gaze travels every greater distances in order to separate from the spectral remains of convict masculinity. Whether its in the guise of Mick Taylor, or Alexander Pearce, Voss, Brett Sprague or Ned Kelly, Martin Bryant or Ivan Milat, we are all trying desperately to escape from the ruins of our own colonial becoming. This is a becoming that disturbs not only because of the deviancy of gender but also because of the deviant undercurrents of fiction and fantasy associated with Europe’s Gothic structuring of Australian history.

However, if the fictional materiality of Australian European history and its intimate relationship with Gothic literature speaks to an ongoing instability around questions of national and individual identity, it also provides an opportunity to move productively beyond the confines of these questions. In the process it offers possibilities

191 for formulating new polymorphic modalities of fiction. As cultural theorist Roger Bromley argues in Narratives for a New Belonging, marginalised fiction/s play a central role in helping to fashion post-colonial identities beyond the binary relationship of centre and periphery. As Bromley contends:

Marginalised fictions are, for the most part, constructed around figures who look in from the outside while looking out from the inside, to the extent that both inside and outside lose their defining contours. They are figures with hyphenated identities, living hybrid realities which pose problems for classification and control, as well as raising questions about notions of essential difference. The in-between zones are shifting grounds, threshold spaces, and displacement and migration have led to struggle for space where identity is endlessly constructed, and deconstructed, across difference and against set inside/outside oppositions.42

The fictional fragmentation of convict masculinity as a hyphenated identity speaks to a

European Australian identity whose meaning is constituted around both the integrating and hyphenating of difference. At the same time it also suggests the possibility of transcending this turn towards semiotic and ideological integration. It is within the space of the hyphen itself and between the binary formulations of periphery and centre, that the spectral form of the marginalised subject can productively re-imagine itself.

Within this liminal, uncanny space the fragmented remains of convict masculinity are productively re-mixed into new stutterings, new constellations of geographic and personal identity. In this hyphenated gap the ruins of European Australian representation coalesce around the after-glow that is Modernity’s colonial enterprise. Cast in its melancholic shadow, the re-mediated form of colonial loss is productively fashioned around the fictional contingency of spectral materiality. The re-animation of convict masculinity folds out into a domain that is both of the convict and beyond the convict. The cultural and physical disconnect between the convict, his masculinity and the landscape is not so much an ontological problem to be resolved as the heterogeneous condition of our material self. When we see the headless convict running through the bush, the image speaks to a way of seeing and not-seeing. It is a type of performance that is constituted fundamentally around the process of rag-picking;

42 Roger Bromley, Narratives for a New Belonging: Diasporic Cultural Fictions (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 5. 192 a positive re-ordering of self refracted through the debased semiotic ruins of the convict Other. In the context of Give My Regards to Broadway (part 1), this sense of productive difference is evoked through the heterogeneous materiality of the image. The montaged form that comprises this drawing, its amalgamated re-mixing of different composite parts, is the image. The fragmented stutterings of personal representation located around the convict form emphasis a polymorphic hybridity that is analogous to both the reproduction of Australia’s national identity and the performance of contemporary heterosexual masculinity.

This dialectical method then articulates a type of spatial self-haunting, a phantasmagorical interiority populated with the ghostly remains of past images and past histories, an amalgam of fictions that in their degraded condition and in their recognisable non-recognition, impart an uncanny quality to the reproduction of convict masculinity. As the French poet and art critic Baudelaire wrote in the Salon of 1859 “I would rather go to the theatre and feast my eyes on the scenery, in which I find my dearest dreams artistically expressed, and tragically concentrated! These things, because they are false, are infinitely closer to the truth; whereas the majority of our landscape-painters are liars, precisely because they have neglected to lie.”43 In this insightful statement the aesthetic experience of modernity is structured around an uncanny process whereby the truth of our own representation is most clearly enunciated through an art that is deliberately false; an art that is a non-mimetic iteration of reality. In art that conflates our phantasmagorical condition with mimetic realism, the apparent truthfulness of this realism conceals from us the constructed ideological mechanisms that situate us within the aesthetic materiality of universal history.

The political contingency of the fragmented convict form lies in our ability to

43 Charles Baudelaire, Art in Paris 1845-1862: Salons And Other Exhibitions, Reviewed By Charles Baudelaire, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (1965; repr., Oxford: Phaidon Press, 1981), 202-203. Citations are to the 1981 edition.

193 recognise in his degraded aesthetic condition the ruin of our own cultural and gendered representation. In other words, to recognise that we not only haunt ourselves, but that this haunting spills out into our spatial engagement with the surrounding environment. In Give My Regards to Broadway (part 1) this spatial self-haunting becomes more apparent when viewed in the context of the entire body of work. Like a non-linear series of film stills, the narrative rupture generated between the drawings conveys a quality of productive spectral displacement; a spatial gap that disrupts the homogenous continuity of empty time, thereby opening up an alternative historical space that allows for an array of counter-memories and marginalised narrative becomings to re-materialise. The movement/non-movement of each convict within these drawings, speaks to the uncanny reanimation of Australia’s marginalised colonial experience; a process that turns upon the haptic fragmentation of convict masculinity.

4.11 - Taylor un/made

In relation to the film Wolf Creek this fragmentation of Australian masculinity allows for the characters of Ben and Taylor to be viewed beyond a restrictive binary formulation. Rather than situating Taylor and Ben within separate discreet models of masculinity, it might be more useful to imagine them operating together. Then, every single performance of heterosexual masculinity harbours within it a multitude of elements of which Taylor and Ben are but two examples. Seen in this way, heterosexual masculinity, like all gendered positions is constantly disturbed and in flux, perpetually folding over, splitting, and reconnecting. In Wolf Creek this convergence of masculinities is generated through the film’s narrative perspective, in which both the clash of masculinities and the violence and anxiety associated with the rural population, are at all times constructed from the backpackers’ point of view. The film is expressing not so much a rural suspicion of the urban but rather the urban fear of the rural. As a consequence Taylor’s character, his psychotic masculine behaviour and indeed the entire tableaux of the desert environment, could be described as a phantasmagoria of urban anxiety in which his destructive and unstable masculinity embodies the uncanny

194 articulation of the urban Australian heterosexual male subject.

Within this confabulation of gender, culture and identity, Taylor’s character represents a spectre of uncanny masculinity that not only harbours our urban present but also our convict past. Taylor performs, or drags, a form of heterosexual melancholy in which a fraught and dysfunctional convict masculinity is simultaneously refused and incorporated into the body politic. Australian heterosexual masculinity is thus caught between repeating the original repudiation of the convict’s masculinity, and reproducing the convict’s dysfunctional performance. This repudiation marks out the originating trauma of European Australia’s gendered identity. The transmission of this trauma into an expression of cultural melancholy however is a process that develops through the historical/social repression that permeates around the convicts. As such the performance of contemporary heterosexual masculinity in Australia expresses the acting out of the unresolved and unacknowledged grief attendant with this historical event.

Masculinity and convictism in Australia, becomes a conflicted process of repudiation and incorporation that is itself a replication of a broader interaction between patriarchy, hegemonic masculinity and the contemporary male subject. Looking at Wolf Creek, the relationship between masculinity and patriarchy seems particularly aligned with the spectral. In this sense Mick Taylor functions as the ideological presence located within the patriarchal articulation of authority. The characterisation of Taylor is a concentrated form of patriarchy; this is patriarchy un-feted and un-human. It is patriarchy as post-human, or as a fractured and splintered army of spectral machines. The clash between Taylor and the backpackers, and particularly Ben, might be seen as the patriarchal exchange located within all expressions of gender. Certainly in Wolf Creek this exchange is at its most extreme and demented. However within the patriarchal excessiveness of Taylor, the audience gets a sense of the ideological violence embedded within both the ideological formation of heterosexual masculinity and the mundane little violences repeatedly worked upon the male body to enforce compliance within the hegemonic patriarchal model.

195 Yet, counter-intuitively, Taylor perhaps also represents a spectre that is not so much a concentrated form of patriarchy, but one that is devoid or empty of patriarchal authority. Taylor’s masculinity is devoid of the signifying presence of the phallus. Like Brett Sprague in The Boys, Taylor expresses a manic and hysteric patriarchal force that is desperately searching for the sense of control and agency that has become displaced from the performance of masculine identity. For Benjamin A. Brabon the consequences of this displacement and fracturing of masculinity have redefined the inscription of masculinity within contemporary cultural expressions of the gothic. As Brabon writes:

The relationship between pleasure and pain that has historically defined the female Gothic heroine has been transferred in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries on to the postfeminist man. I argue that an inversion has taken place, as the female Gothic heroine cedes her position and role to the postfeminist man. In other words, men’s masculine identity has been transformed from sadism directed at women to masochism aimed at men. Instead of the female Gothic heroine performing her role of victim, it is the postfeminist man “miming” masculinity. In this sense, the postfeminist man’s new status of victim is defined and delineated by his masculinity – he is trapped between the loss of his essentialist quality of masculinity and his attempt to reassert a strong masculine identity.44

Brabon’s contention is that the conflicted mechanisms of repudiation and integration located within contemporary masculinity have generated a form of spectral phallus. It has become a ghostly apparition that embodies both the presence of authority and through its ‘phantasmic form’, a simultaneous sense of lack or absence. The signifying power of the phallus has become de-coupled from the male subject; a position that echos Lacan’s understanding of the phallus as a signifier of lack rather than gender.

Brabon clearly articulates a post-feminist understanding of masculinity that is situated within the context of contemporary Gothic narratives. However from its inception, Gothic Literature has been preoccupied with Modernity’s violent and disruptive impact upon gender and masculinity. If Brabon’s post-feminist Gothic masculinity points to the catastrophe or crisis that now marks out the male subject, this crisis (as realised in the form of convict masculinity) demonstrates its historical

44 Benjamin A. Brabon, “The Spectral Phallus: Re-Membering the Postfeminist Man,” in Postfeminist Gothic: Critical Interventions in Contemporary Culture, ed. Ben A. Brabon and Stephanie Genz (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 59-61. 196 status as the norm rather than the exception. Brabon writes that the “postfeminist man is a reconfiguration of the female Gothic heroine – relying on his performance of male gender identity to act as a substitute for the ‘real thing,’ ”45 The qualities of masochism, phallic lack, and mimetic performance that he assigns to contemporary masculinity in an uncanny sense also describes the inscription of gender in relation to the Australian male convict. In this context the regime of scopic/physical technologies established throughout the penal colony violently re-animates the grotesque remains of the convict form along a masochistic, mimetic axis that parallels and haunts the reproduction of the postfeminist male subject.

However the peculiarities of contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity as realised through the convict form are not the expression of some proto-postfeminist male sensibility. Rather, in a post-colonial sense, what this uncanny exchange alludes to is perhaps something even more radical; namely the possibility of imagining European Australia as an alternative modernity. This notion is one that post-colonial theorist Bill Ashcroft raises in the essay “Reading Post-Colonial Australia”. He argues that:

The task of understanding the formation of alternative modernities requires us to look at the cultural engagements that occurred between colonised people and dominant ways of knowing. Fundamentally, when we talk of place, language, and history, we are talking about a contentious struggle between ways of seeing, ways of naming, and ways of narrating memory, but they all fall into the orbit of a struggle over representation. This struggle is less obvious in the settler colonies. Yet the post-colonial reading of Australian art and literature gives a clue to the ambivalent, creative, and transformative ways in which alternative modernities are adapted.46

For Ashcroft the material formation of alternative modernities is directly tied to the aesthetic efficacy of post-colonialism. A relationship that, like Walter Benjamin, allocates creative discourses such as art and literature a central role in the transmission, creation and reproduction of ideological concerns. Located within a post-colonial

45 Ibid., 66.

46 Bill Ashcroft, “Reading Post-Colonial Australia,” in Postcolonial Issues in Australian Literature, ed. Nathanel O’Reilly (New York: Cambria Press, 2010), 20.

197 lens, such flows of cultural production/s, when re-directed and blocked, can thus be utilised to both reveal and critique the properties of political and cultural power that travel between the centre and the periphery; and at the same time also allow for new alternative becomings to develop beyond the horizon of this relationship.

In a Benjaminian sense then it might be said that the exchange between the centre and the periphery is its own form of dialectical image. This is a moment when the image of the marginalised past flashes up around a point of historical rupture; and out of which springs a constellation of counter-memories articulated around both the visual arts and literature. For Ashcroft the possibilities of an alternative Australian modernity lie with the cultural specificities of adaption, resistance and mutation particular to place. These specificities mark out our post-colonial struggle over/engagement with “the imperial discourses that ‘constructed’ Australia, discourses that were dissonant with local reality.”47 The particularities of European Australia’s post-colonial modernity are thus closely aligned with the experience/trauma of dissonance. However the impact of this traumatic dissonance upon the Australian European psyche relates as much to questions of gender and masculinity as it does to place. The problematic nature concerning Australian national identity and history in no small part relates to the manner in which the European Australian imagination has struggled to get a handle on a local reality. The specificities of Australia’s post-colonial modernity subsequently relate to a raft of dissonant discourses that the transported convicts brought here themsleves.

The founding moment of Australian European identity therefore circulates around the actualisation of a convict body, whose fractured deviant masculinity inaugurates a dissonant sense of internal displacement, one that haunts not only the convicts themsleves but also the colony as a whole. The convict form is marked by the melancholic shadow of its own mimetic failure, its inability to adequately fulfil or perform the ideological criteria associated with hegemonic masculinity. It is this mimetic failure interpellated through the 132,308 individual male convicts exiled here

47 Ibid., 36 198 that established European Australia’s fraught and unstable foundation. The violence enacted upon and by the character of Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek on one level speaks to a broader cultural pathology. A deep seated desire to destroy and erase the spectral ruins of our own mimetic masculinity and in the process cast aside the marginalised convict foundation that continues to haunt the European Australian imagination.

Of course the problem that both Mick Taylor and the European Australian subject face, is that his and our Gothic performance of deviant masculinity is fundamentally constituted around a process of spectral rag picking. To be a spectral ragpicker is first and foremost to be the ghost of a previous self, to be a partial and liminal fragment of the past. The convict spectre disturbs the naturalised formulation of Australian vision and history precisely because the degraded materiality of the spectral form enunciates so clearly the impoverished fragility of all mimetic representation. Contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity seeks to annul the very spectral properties that constitute the particular accent that is Australian modernity/masculinity. The impossibility of this approach only adds to our European sense of unease and dislocation. The ghosts of our convict past, the spectral fragments of convict masculinity jostle beside the spectral ruins of the present, pointedly refusing to simply disappear. As post-colonial theorist Graham Huggan writes in the essay “Ghost Stories, Bone Flutes, Cannibal Countermemory”, in this spectral refusal we sense the manner in which:

...ghosts make a mockery of the institutional respects we pay to satisfy the dead. And to keep ourselves separate from them – for ghosts have contempt for boundaries, for all our cherished social distinctions. They walk through historical walls, co-existing with the present, and literalising the memories we consecrate in metaphor in order to contain them…Ghosts bring the past into our midst, that we might recognise it. But they also estrange the past; their relationship to the history that they reinstate is inherently uncertain.48

The spectre of convict masculinity, and the spectre that is Mick Taylor thus operates within a type of confected moment, where the present and the past coexist in the same

48 Graham Huggan, “Ghost Stories, Bone Flutes, Cannibal Countermemory,” in Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 128. 199 temporal space. If this reinstated moment/history is inherently uncertain, it is located within a constellation of uncertainties that are both productive and destructive. The performance of Mick Taylor in Wolf Creek, as with that of Brett Sprague in The Boys and Alexander Pearce in Van Diemen’s Land, reproduces the destructive particularities embedded in the accent of Australian modernity. However when the spectral formulation of Australian European identity is relocated beyond a negative signification of difference, a constellation of productive possibilities opens up around heterosexual masculinity. These are possibilities of becoming that are located within and reproduced through the optical unconscious of our visual cultural environment.

200 CHAPTER FIVE:

The Visual Gaze - Practices of Art and Masculinity

201 This chapter places the thematic concerns of the dissertation within the material context of the visual practice. The chapter has three primary aims. The first is to explore the textual processes, forms, and outcomes that comprise the visual work. The second is to situate the ideological reproduction and experience of Australian masculinity within the contingent materiality of the visual practice, and the third is to address the methodological framework that underscores the practice as a form of research. The central preoccupation of this discussion concerns the manner in which the visual practice materialises the relationship between convict representation and contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity. The emotional force that drives the dissertation and the practice relates to the prescriptive impact patriarchy has had upon the construction of Australian national identity and heterosexual masculinity. In looking to deconstruct the effect of patriarchy, the art practice both disrupts the naturalising of meaning associated with masculinity and national identity, and explores the possibility for different ideological expressions of the masculine subject. The visual practice addresses the manner in which ideology and representation operate across multiple registers of social, political and personal space.

In looking to unpack the relationship between patriarchy and masculinity my visual practice locates this exchange around the narrative formulation of meaning and origin. As with the dissertation, the art practice addresses the ideological fault-lines that have dominated European Australia’s desire for an authentic point of cultural and historical foundation. In the context of the visual research these fault-lines are located around the cultural and national trauma associated with the representation and displacement of convict masculinity as monstrous/deviant. The fashioning of this traumatic moment within the materiality of the work is articulated through Walter Benjamin and Deleuze/Guattari’s conceptual understanding of repetition, difference, affect, and representation. Divided broadly into two sections, the first half of the chapter addresses questions of ideology, representation and identity, and the second half will explore the impact of these discourses directly upon the work itself. The focus in this chapter is predominantly concerned with exploring my visual practice as a form of

202 research into masculinity. Within this discussion, the work of artists TV Moore and Daniel Boyd will be touched upon.

5.1 – You take ideology, I’ll take representation

Ideology here refers to the dominant epistemological markers of identity that intersect through the cultural formation of the subject. Within this context ideology is not something which can be removed from our person, that is, we cannot stand outside of ideology and say ‘now I am free’. Rather the significance of ideology arguably resides within its role in the production of identity itself. As Slavoj Zizek argues, ideology “… is not the ‘false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by ‘false consciousness’.”1 The experience of misrecognition associated with ideology is not an expression of a false consciousness on the part of the subject but resides within the very formation of identity and masculinity itself.

However, while ideology is a liminal mechanism that operates most effectively when undetected, the mechanics of ideology necessitate that its impact and presence cannot go completely unnoticed or felt. While ideology tends to essentialise notions of gender, masculinity and the state, this ongoing process of naturalisation is mediated through an unstable cultural imagination that allows for the possibility of different and contested expressions of identity. The ideological inscription of identity thus operates on two different registers, simultaneously opening up but also closing down the possibility of meaning. The figure of the convict, then, resides at the juncture between these two registers. In the process the convict foregrounds and disturbs the underlying instability embedded within the symbolic reproduction of identity.

It is here then, at points of cultural and psychological disturbance, that the ideological after-image, or trace, brushes up against both representation and the subject. Representation understood in this sense is not the copy of ideology, but the material performance and experience of ideology. Representation is the material realisation

1 Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989; repr., London: Verso, 2008), 16. Citation is to the 2008 edition 203 of our ideological self. In a Benjaminian context, representation is where ideology intersects with the subject, thus representation is the trace or scar that performs our integration into the ideological space of the symbolic. In this sense, the lived experience of representation marks the myriad of decisions we make and don’t make as we navigate through our daily lives; from the clothes we wear, to the food we eat and the way we move through space. Representation, as the performance of the symbolic, points to the manner in which the subject both directs ideology, and is directed by ideology. In the exchange between ideology and representation, there are always points of tension, places of rupture and re-configuration when traces of ideological force spill over from the immaterial space of the ‘symbolic’ into the materiality of the ‘real’.

For Benjamin it is at the extremes of social and cultural space where figures such as the ragpicker, the Flaneur, and the detective reside, where representation as the performance of ideology begins to productively fray. It is here, where the consensus around representation as capitalism breaks down, that the threat of non-representation illuminates the historical trauma of Modernity. Importantly, for Benjamin, art as a visual discourse presents as the perfect medium with which to address and experience, the tensions between representation and ideology. As already discussed in the film Wolf Creek, the figuration of the convict as a Gothic expression of Benjamin’s ragpicker speaks to the traumatic representation embedded within the European Australian imagination. The convict form is articulated within the trope of the monstrous, the Gothic, as a means of locating European Australian masculinity and national identity within the psychological tableaux of repression, desire, and affect.

The Gothic as a mode of representation is important to both the dissertation and the visual practice because it specifically addresses the relationship between trauma and identity. As cultural and literary theorist Ellen Brinks argues in the journal article “‘Nobody’s Children’: Gothic Representation and Traumatic History in ‘The Devil’s Backbone.’”, the Gothic as a genre is:

204 ...concerned with how a repressed or denied past intrudes into the present in an unwanted, fear-inducing guise, it is a genre well-suited to explore the continuing effects of traumatic history, whether individual or collective. Further, it is a narrative mode whose oft-noted formal features – repetition and fragmentation – mirror the incompletion and uncertainty of trauma survivors’ stories, as they struggle to narrate events from their own past and to survive.2

Brinks, in this passage, highlights the importance of repetition and fragmentation to the interaction between Gothic narratives and discourse of trauma. The experience of both is structured around a debilitating rupturing of representation and meaning; a rupture that results in the compulsive, irresolvable turning over of the past into the present. The Gothic formulation of European Australian identity within a monstrous and spectral space establishes a liminal relationship between the past and the present and between history and identity that turns upon the traumatic representation of convict masculinity. This repetitive, re-imagining of convict identity as Gothic monstrosity opens the European Australian subject up to the non-meaning and lack that continues to haunt the ideological reproduction of both national identity and contemporary Australian masculinity today.

5.2 – Island hopping

Looking at the art work, the interaction of ideology, exteriority and heterosexual masculinity is addressed through the repetitive structure of the practice itself, or more precisely, the exhibited body of work. An art exhibition, from the type of work selected to the manner in which the work is installed, replicates aspects of ideological interaction. The display of art, as much as the work itself, manifests the ideological tendency to naturalise or essentialise the articulation of political and social power. In art, as with ideology itself, this process of naturalisation turns to a significant degree upon mimesis and repetition. An exhibition devoted to a single practice (for instance painting or photography) will, through its repetition of this particular media, engender a sense of homogeneity and ideological closure. This in turn minimises notions of

2 Ellen Brinks, “‘Nobody’s Children’: Gothic Representation and Traumatic History in ‘The Devil’s Backbone,’” in “Part 1: Trauma and Rhetoric,” special issue, JAC 24, no. 2, (2004): 293, http:// www.jstore.org/stable/20866627. 205 becoming, difference and change. The ideological closure of meaning points to a fixed performativity that relates as much to heterosexual masculinity, as art.

The exhibition structure of my work seeks to disrupt this tendency towards homogeneity by reconfiguring the practice around a repetitive intermedial approach. In essence, the practice becomes an archipelago of processes. The archipelago, as a grouping of islands, speaks to a spatial interaction that is fluid, hybrid and heterogeneous, as well as a physical environment that emphasises the partial and transient process of composition and construction. This constituting of space or place through the grouping of porous bodies is a key process in the practice. The work is framed not around a single homogenous mode of expression, but rather around a series of groupings or islands, with each grouping comprising a particular material, process and size.

By recalibrating the one into the many, the practice endeavors to disrupt the linguistic closure of meaning by opening up a multitude of spaces, gaps and avenues through which the subject can escape their own ideological formulation. As Deleuze and Guattari write, the “only way to get outside the dualism is to be between, to pass between.”3 Within this context, it is the spaces between the work, as much as the work itself that generates meaning and points to the generative properties of difference. The heterogeneity of approaches located within the archipelago of the practice therefore establishes a structural framework which foregrounds the importance of difference and disrupts those ideological qualities that calcify around binary articulations of power, nature and identity.

Broadly speaking the visual practice as part of this composite creative PhD, is articulated through a semi-figurative, intermedial approach in which a range of media from plasticine to textiles, printmaking, painting, photography, sculpture and drawing are deployed. Utilising the visual motifs of portraiture and landscape this

3 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1980; New York: Continuum, New York, 2010), 305. Citations refer to the Continuum edition. 206 multi-disciplinary/intermedial approach incorporates a flat graphic technique to depict a grotesque troupe of ghosts, ghouls and vampires. Unifying these conceptual elements is a Gothic/carnivalesque sensibility that foregrounds the emotional and structural interaction between heterosexual masculinity, national identity and convict representation.

In a methodological context, the critical unpacking of Australian masculinity and national identity through repetition and difference incorporates into the practice Deleuze’s positive understanding of difference through repetition. Like Benjamin, Deleuze contends that repetition, as a mode of experience, is not the partial copy of the ‘real’ or the expression of difference as lack. Instead as Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sense:

Being neither the identity of the Same nor the equivalence of the similar, repetition is found in the intensity of the Different … In short, the double, the reflection or the simulacrum opens up at last to surrender its secret: repetition does not presuppose the Same or the Similar – these are not its prerequisites. It is repetition, on the contrary, which produces the only ‘same’ of that which differs, and the only resemblance of the different.4

For Deleuze this form of repetition is not aligned with, or part of, an object-subject exchange. Rather it expresses what he refers to as the force of “true repetition”.5 For

Deleuze true repetition as the embodiment of difference not only provides a means of navigating out of the false repetition of exactness, but also points to the creative potential located around the becoming of difference itself. Deleuze’s understanding of repetition and difference locates the force of becoming within a field of open-ended multiplicities, which unencumbered by binary constraints, shoot out in every direction.

5.3 – If ever my dreams should stutter

The thematic concerns located around this articulation of repetition and differences are ones that Deleuze expands upon in his discussions around stuttering.

4 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic Of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1969; London: Continuum, 2009), 329. Citations refer to the Continuum edition.

5 Ibid., 328. 207 In the essay “He Stuttered”, Deleuze argues that creative “stuttering is what makes language grow from the middle, like grass: it is what makes language a rhizome instead of a tree, what puts language in perpetual disequilibrium.”6 For Deleuze, stuttering functions as a mode of political action which permits a writer or artist to alter the flow of cultural authority through the process of asignification. As Deleuze sees it, the political authority associated with signification is enunciated not only through what is spoken but how it is spoken. As a consequence any process of linguistic/visual disruption to that signification has the potential to challenge or re-imagine the dominant hegemonic voice. Put another way, hegemony could be described as a vocalized force of utterances and intonations vibrating both within and around the body. The ideological authority of these hegemonic utterances is then dependant upon a certain smoothing out of any glitches and of any competing or conflicting noises, sounds or meaning which may undermine the appearance of homogenous unity.

When artists engage in forms of cultural repetition they become for Deleuze a type of foreigner in their own language, one who makes the “language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur.”7 By deliberately embracing a disjointed mode of expression, in turning towards the forced repetition of stuttering, the artist opens up a space, a moment of nonsense, confusion and disjunction which not only threatens the sense of meaning/authority ascribed by the dominant hegemonic position but also opens up a multiplicity of different possible understandings and creations.

In the alterity of the newly opened space, the affective and generative force of difference itself in embraced. However, Deleuze’s affective articulation of stuttering is not an expression of revolutionary separation. Instead, the linguistic stuttering functions within the major or dominant fold of the hegemonic field. It acts as mechanism for opening up multiple cultural, social and political becomings rather than as a movement

6 Gilles Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” in Essays: Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Paris: Les Editions Minuit, 1993; London: Verso, 1998), 111. Citations are to the Verso edition.

7 Ibid., 110. 208 towards the destruction or closing down of the hegemonic order itself. For Deleuze, stuttering as a cultural mechanism is at its most effective when it pushes language to its very edge and to a point outside of itself when the hegemonic dominance of that language falls silent.8 Deleuze uses stuttering as a tool within a particular ontological framework, which seeks to remove the stutter from the stutterer. However as a person who stutters, the implications of this condition is a bodily experience that incorporates the political and the personal together. As a stutterer or a person not in control of the spoken word, the experience of stuttering is a constant reminder of the affective instability of language. Thus every repeated word, letter, or sound intimately refuses the illusion of hegemonic authority.

The loss of agency and self is doubly acute, for to stutter is to feel betrayed and diminished not only by those around you but also by your own body. That is, to stutter is to experience again and again the performative lack of authority both between yourself and language, and between yourself and those around you. In the journal article titled “About Face/Stuttering Discipline” Joshua Gunn and Jenny Edbauer Rice address some of the tensions that exist between language, power and speech. They write:

Speakers who stutter describe the difficulty of interacting with people who respond with embarrassment. It is common for listeners to experience a kind of pain, turning away from the stutterer in discomfort. Public education campaigns have taught listeners to avoid finishing sentences for people who stutter. Yet, as a stutterer might tell you, the space between those sounds create a gap of signification that many listeners find intolerable. Far too often the interlocutor simply tosses out words and phrases in an effort to end the stutter. This discomfort does not necessarily come from a lack of ‘‘communication’’ in the event of stuttering. Rather, the stutter can be heard as an over-exposure of speech. It is an entanglement between body and language.9

The affective intensity of this linguistic entanglement points to the asignifying force of stuttering. The process of stuttering designates not so much a lack of meaning but rather the opposite: an over abundance of meaning. Stuttering as a speech act is a performative

8 Ibid., 113.

9 Joshua Gunn and Jenny Edbauer Rice, “About Face/Stuttering Discipline,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 6, no. 2 (2009): 217-218, doi: 10.1080/14791420902868029. 209 expression which conveys both the social anxiety around repetition/difference and the desire to fix the meaning of repetition/difference into a binary structure. At the same time however, stuttering also conveys the creative potential of repetition/difference. That is, to stutter is to reside within a realm of discordant cadences that open language up to a process of mutation, transformation and becoming.

5.4 – Singing karaoke

In the context of the practice each artwork stumbles over the previous one, expressing in the process a garbled, disjointed version of itself. These islands of work made up of the stuttered remains of sculptures, textiles, paintings and drawings, express a mode of asignification that simultaneously addresses both the codification and de- codification of gender. Looking at the drawing When convicts sing karaoke (part 1) (Figure 15) a monstrous convict is depicted alone in the bush wading across a river. The sense of stuttered masculinity in this image is conveyed through the material dislocation of the figure from the surrounding narrative field/ground. Like the drawing Give my regards to Broadway, which is discussed in Chapter four, this clash is fashioned around both the dissonant spatial relationship between the figure of the convict, who resides on a scrap of paper that has been montaged into the surrounding image, and the different cadency of rendered marks between the two spatial areas. This deliberate non-integration of the two spaces foregrounds an atmosphere of aesthetic ambiguity, which parallels the disrupted non-meaning associated with stuttering. It is as if the montaged component belongs elsewhere or it is a foreign element that has intruded into the landscape.

In a sense the convict isn’t so much moving through the landscape as stepping or stumbling into it. The flat, torn quality of the montaged area evokes a type of temporal rupture that denotes a collapsing of time as well as space. Thus the discordant space between the montaged figure and the ground is suggestive of a type of delayed or partial movement that cycles around in a repetitive, compulsive fashion. Through this figural re-composition, the repetitive movement of the convict opens out into an

210 intertextual performance that in-turn re-materialises the cultural forms of Mick Taylor, Voss, Alexander Pearce, and Brett Sprague. The fragmented displacement of convict masculinity associated with the rupturing of convict representation traumatises the European Australian imagination precisely because it remains un-integrated into either the physical or symbolic landscape.

Figure 15. Shannon Field, When Convicts Sing Karaoke (part 1), 2011. Mixed media, 58 x 82cm. Property of the artist.

The flattened convict form parallels the flattening of history, time and geography. In a Benjaminian/Deleuzian sense everything resides along a plane of historical immanence. There is no separation between past and present, no closure or end; rather the convicts of 1788 continue to roam across Australia’s cultural landscape, bursting through the hermetically sealed segmentation generated by major literature. In the process, they bring with them, their contaminated and unstable mode of masculine identity. Then again perhaps it is not so much a question of bursting through, as of an eternal becoming. That is, the convicts and their expression of minor-masculinity haven’t simply gone and then returned; rather they never left in the first place. They have always been present, and, in this sense, we are them and they are now.

211 In the drawing, When Convicts Sing Karaoke (part 1), the convicts’ temporal disruption opens up a liminal space that permits different modes of masculine performance to become. The stuttered variability of convict masculinity could be situated along what Deleuze describes as a syntactic line:

Syntax being constituted by the curves, rings, and deviations of this dynamic line as it passes through points, from the double view point of disjunctions and connections. It is no longer the former or superficial syntax that governs the equilibriums of language, but a syntax in the process of becoming, a creation of syntax that gives birth to a foreign language within language, a grammar of disequilibrium.10

And so the monstrous stuttering of convict masculinity depicts the potential for difference, rather than a realised difference. As he traverses across the work, the convict is in a state of traumatic flux, on the run from the centre, from the major, and from himself. This sense of being on the run or displaced, enunciates a type of melancholic loss that circulates around the performance of colonial convict masculinity. The lost convict inhabits a weirdly melancholic landscape that is both literal and fictional.

The convict figure is moving as much away from, as towards this fractured performance of Australian masculinity. He points to both the potential for becoming, for the deterritorialization of the existing hegemonic expression of heterosexual masculinity and the potential for its reterritorialization. The referent of convict identity disturbs not because of its monstrous form, but rather because this form suggests the potential for difference and for a different performance of heterosexual masculinity. It is this potential for difference which threatens to destablise the established hegemonic order. In this drawing the convict is depicted moving through the bush, trying perhaps to escape from the major articulation of masculinity and trying to perform a different mode of heterosexual masculinity.

In the context of contemporary Australian art this stuttering of multiple masculinities is a quality particularly evident in the work of Australian artist TV Moore. Best known for his installation video work, Moore creates highly fabricated

10 Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” 112. 212 dream-like environments that materialise the liminal interiority of the male psyche. Incorporating elements of cabaret, vaudeville and slapstick together, Moore introduces into these theatrical spaces a range of historical and contemporary figures alongside of various fictionalised personas/characters. As curator Luke Parker writes, Moore “creates portraits of men that blur the boundaries between documentary and fiction, destruction and creation, celebration and lament. He often depicts figures of outsiders or outlaws: masculine archetypes cast adrift, floating in amoral universes.”11 Moore’s work conveys something of Benjamin’s productive melancholy. Like my own practice Moore’s melancholic critique of Australian masculinity, stutters a type of brooding dissonance that is both comical and desperate.

In one of Moore’s best-known video pieces The Neddy project, 2001- 2004, (Figure 16.) various scenes or moments related to the outlaw/criminal figures of Ned Kelly and Arthur ‘Neddy’ Smith are reconstructed and overlapped. In this intersection between the two Neddys questions of criminality, masculinity and representation are highlighted. Like Shaun Gladwell’s Maddest Maximus series, Moore directly draws upon, and references, aspects of Sidney Nolan’s Kelly paintings. However in contrast to Gladwell’s smooth, highly polished approach, Moore’s Neddy project is structured around a deliberately fabricated/clunky theatrical aesthetic. This clunky aesthetic is perhaps most clearly expressed around Moore’s construction of elaborately made up cardboard props such as cars and horses. The presence of these clunky props in Moore’s work speaks to an Australian male identity that in its excessive theatricality, violently and comically stutters the dominant formulation of hegemonic masculinity. In its theatrical repetitive excess, Moore’s Neddy project foregrounds the desperate manner in which masculinity in Australia hysterically stutters an array of mythic forms; consequently like the convict in the drawing When Convicts Sing Karaoke, Moore’s

11 Luke Parker, “The Myths of Masculinity,” in Man: Depicting Contemporary Masculinity, curated by Luke Parker (Penrith: Penrith Regional Gallery & The Lewers Bequest, 2008), b3. Exhibition catalogue.

213 twin Neddy’s stumble across a Australian landscape littered with the ruins of a fractured European psyche.

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPYRIGHT RESTRICTIONS

Figure 16. TV Moore, Wild Colonial Boy (Kelly) 2001- 2004. Single channel DV/DVD from a series of ten, duration time approximately 3:30 minutes. Video, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

5.5 – Minor major

In the essay “He Stuttered”, Deleuze touches upon a quality of the stutter he likens to being a “foreigner in his own language: he does not mix another language with his own language, he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within his own language.”12 This sense of being a foreigner within your own language is one that Deleuze in collaboration with Felix Guattari, extends into the notion of minor literature/ language. In A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia Deleuze and Guattari describe minor language as:

12 Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” 110.

214 Constructing a continuum of variation, negotiating all of the variables both to constrict the constants and to expand the variables: make language stammer, or make it “wail,” stretch tensors through all of language, even written language, and draw from it cries, shouts, pitches, durations, timbres, accents, intensities. Two conjoined tendencies in so-called minor languages have often been noted: an impoverishment, a shredding of syntactical and lexical forms: but simultaneously a strange proliferation of shifting effects, a taste for overload and paraphrase.13

For Deleuze and Guattari minor language is a mode of expression that works within the major language in order to deterritorialize the major position. A minor language is never separate or removed from the major but as a force of becoming, of difference and multiplicity; it operates from within the major language. Minor literature, by scratching or stammering the major tone or syntax, functions as an agent of transformation that acts to hollow out the inertia located within major literature. In the process, producing lines of flight from the known to the unknown, from the dominate to the marginalised.

For Deleuze and Guattari the major language presents as “a state of power and domination … [that] assumes the standard measure.”14 As an expression of the standard measure, the major language encompasses the movement towards homogeny, stasis and standardisation. As with hegemonic authority, the sensation of the major language is experienced then as a cultural pull towards the centre. In comparison minor language/ literature, is in its heterogenic instability, marked by a rhizomic movement outwards. This process forms a deterritorialised becoming, which in turn reconfigures the ideological strictures that define the major language. Accordingly in relation to gender, Deleuze and Guattari locate becoming, and minor literature/language around the notion of becoming–women. For Deleuze and Guattari becoming is only accessible to those subjects who reside within the minor, to that end the hegemonic or standard/majoritarian position of masculinity precludes the possibility of a becoming–man. While this doesn’t mean that the male subject is unable to facilitate a mode of becoming, Deleuze and Guattari contend that this movement, or stammering of masculinity is only possible

13 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 115.

14 Ibid., 116. 215 through the vector of becoming–women.15

However this formulation of becoming–women as it intersects through postcolonial theory and gender theory is not without its problems. As Spivak argues in the essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” there is at times a reductionist and over- deterministic quality to Deleuze and Guattari’s work that too quickly dispenses with the relationship between representation, ideology, and subjectivity. In turning away from the ideological politics of hegemony, Spivak contends that Deleuze and Guattari’s heterogenic articulation of desire and motion “valorizes the concrete experience of the oppressed, while being uncritical about the historical role of the intellectual.”16 Spivak’s concern here with Deleuze and Guattari’s valorizing of the oppressed is addressed particularly in relation to the silencing of the subaltern experience, however, more broadly it also resonates around the question of gender.

Becoming–women could be read as a type of eternal refrain, which essentialise’s the structural ideological relationship between the genders. The female subject being forever incorporated within the minor, and the male subject associated if only symbolically with the dominant/major. As Spivak puts it, Deleuze’s

“postrepresentationalist vocabulary hides an essentialist agenda.”17 While Deleuze and Guattari attempt to complicate this relationship, the underlying essentialism of becoming–women is brought into further relief via intersectional theory’s heterogeneous formulation of gender. Becoming–women in effect, is read against the grain and opened up to the possibility of becoming–male. The incorporation of becoming into becoming– male is utilised as a means of linking convict masculinity to the performance of contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity and to locate both representations of masculine identity within the field of contemporary cultural production. This interaction

15 Ibid., 320-321.

16 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (London: Macmillan Education LTD, 1988), 275.

17 Ibid., 285. 216 between art and minor-masculinity/ minor literature consequently brings into play a discussion around Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature.

In this text, Deleuze and Guattari extensively explore the relationship between art, sensation and minor literature. However in relation to this dissertation, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature is addressed through the lens of Walter Benjamin. The partnering of Deleuze/Guattari with Benjamin has of course a certain synchronicity given the shared interest in Kafka, the Baroque, and minor literature. Within these points of overlap however, lie distinct differences which productively speak to the question of representation. I’m interested here in particular with the different inflection Benjamin puts on minor literature in The Origin of German Tragic Drama. In this text Benjamin argues that:

the production of lesser writers, whose works frequently contain the most eccentric features, will be valued no less than those of great writers. It is one thing to incarnate a form; it is quite a different thing to give its characteristics expression. Whereas the former is the business of the poetic elect, the latter is often done incomparably more distinctly in the laborious efforts of minor writers. The life of the form is not identical with that of the works which are determined by it, indeed the clarity with which it is expressed can sometimes be in inverse proportion to the perfection of a literary work; and the form itself becomes evident precisely in the lean body of the inferior work, as its skeleton so to speak.18

In Benjamin’s reading of minor literature, the importance of minor writers relates to the manner in which the eccentric inferiority of such works reveal the structures and mechanisms that reproduce the content and form of meaning. In this context Benjamin is drawing a parallel between the construction of literature and the historical reproduction of ideological knowledge. For Benjamin, minor literature presents as a form of melancholic allegory, whose skeletal framework reveals the ideological contestation between the representation of meaning and non-meaning. Unlike Deleuze or Guattari who dispense with representation all together, Benjamin’s exploration of

18 Walter Benjamin, The Origin Of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963; London: Verso, 2009), 58. Citations are to the Verso edition.

217 modernity necessitates an ongoing engagement with both registers of representation.

At the same time Benjamin is concerned with addressing the sensations and affective experience of modern life. As Benjamin contends, like the individual asleep who translates the “noises and feelings of his insides, such as blood pressure, intestinal churn, heartbeat and muscle sensation,”19 into dream material, so the somnolent collective in its phantasmagorical slumber transmogrifies the physical manifestations of capitalism, such as the arcades into “its own insides.”20 To that end like Deleuze and Guattari, Benjamin foregrounds the haptic material exchange between subject, space and capitalism. However for Benjamin the phantasmagorical sensation of modernity, that is the manner in which the mechanisms of capitalism affectively traverse across the body, is a process that remains intimately structured around questions of representation.

Much of Benjamin’s work looks to articulate the relationship between sensation and representation as a means of unpacking the temporal manner in which the subject both moves through and is moved by ideology. The incorporation of Benjamin thus acts to counter-balance the postrepresentationalist and the anti-ideological tendencies that underscore Deleuze and Guattari’s work. In this context the Deleuze/Guattarian notions of affect, sensation and movement as read through Benjamin are utilised as a means of critically opening representation up to the possibilities of creative political agency. The interaction and exchange between affect/sensation and minor literature/art is used to re- configure rather than dismantle the relationship between representation and interiority.

As with Benjamin, art for Deleuze and Guattari occupies a central role in fashioning a dialogue around the contingency of experience and meaning. In Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature the contingency of creative practice is thus directly related to the disruptive/violent force of minor literature. As Deleuze and Guattari write:

19 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1982; Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002), 389. Citations are to the Harvard University Press edition.

20 Ibid., 389.

218 There is nothing that is major or revolutionary except the minor. To hate all languages of masters. Kafka’s fascination for servants and employees (the same thing in Proust in relation to servants, to their language. What interests him even more is the possibility of making of his own language – assuming that it is unique, that it is a major language or has been – a minor utilization. To be a sort of stranger within his own language.21

Deleuze and Guattari in this passage articulate the important interaction between the politics of minor literature and the turn to the vernacular. However the vernacular properties open to both literature and art are not the equivalents of a high/low dichotomy. Such a binary only results in the incorporation of the low into the high or the high into the low. Instead, the turn to the vernacular seeks to foreground the ideological mechanism embedded across all modes of representation. In a Benjaminian sense vernacular representation operates like a constellation of possibilities or, in a Deleuze/Guattarian, sense within a rhizome. Vernacular/minor-art playfully refracts representation back out into the political space of ideological sensation. Understood as an expression of the everyday and the popular, the vernacular as a mode of minor- practice provides a means by which contemporary art can offer a stuttered translation of the major.

In relation to the visual practice the use of vernacular materials is utilised to critically unpack the formulation and reproduction of heterosexual masculinity in Australia. The situating of a minor convict masculinity around the vernacular draws upon a range of materials that includes, among other things, plasticine, texta pens, blankets, bed sheets, craft paint, house paint, and rubber masks. The dissonant force of these vernacular materials disturbs the homogenous configuration of representation, through the stuttered asymmetry of a minor-masculinity. Among the various vernacular materials I have used in the practice, one of the most important concerns my use of textiles, and in particular second-hand blankets and sheets. Long regarded as a form of craft associated with the domestic realm of woman’s work, textiles have traditionally

21 Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Theory and History of Literature (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1975; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 26. 219 been perceived as less significant than other fine art forms. As Peter Hobbs argues in the essay, “The Sewing Desire Machine,” the secondary importance accorded to the craft of textile practice emanates out of the patriarchal gendering of fine art as masculine and craft as feminine.22 In the field of cultural production this gendered bias towards craft has subsequently created an ambiguous historical position for textile-based practices.

The ambiguous relationship between textiles and fine art, foregrounds the liminal manner in which textile art is both peripheral and of the centre, absent and present. In this transitional space a semiotic fluidity exists, which allows textile art to address productively the politics of marginal/marginalised identity. Textile theorist, and artist, Mireille Perron, argues that artists who deal with these unresolved cultural/ aesthetic contradictions can be described as:

...inappropriate artists. Their historical position does not allow comfortable relations with the self (textile practices) or the other (dominant art fictions).To be an inappropriated artist is to be in critical relation with one’s practice. The inappropriated artist is committed to tensions–she does not want to embrace and reflect the values of a practice; she prefers to diffract and displace them. Inappropriated artists live in the border.23

Perron’s articulation of the inappropriated artist formulates a type of textile practice that utilises its historical and cultural position to mount an ontological critique of both gender and representation. Drawing upon Perron’s notion of the inappropriated artist my visual practice utilises these same cultural tensions and contradictions to critically address the relationship between convict representation and contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity.

5.6 – Talking trash: conversations with a convict vampire

In my art practice, both the problematic representation of the convict as deviant and its spectral relationship to contemporary masculinity are addressed within a textile

22 Peter Hobbs, “The Sewing Desire Machine,” in Gender and Identity, Reinventing Textiles, vol. 2 (Winchester: Telos Art Publishing, 2001), 52.

23 Mireille Perron, “Common Threads: Local Strategies for ‘Inappropriated’ Artist,” in Material Matters: The Art and Culture of Contemporary Textiles, ed. Ingrid Bachmann and Ruth Scheuing (Canada: YYZ Books, 1998), 125. 220 approach that overlays notions of trash with the monstrous. This ambiguous interaction between past and present modes of masculine representation is particularly evident in a series of three large oversized appliqué portraits of convicts. In the textile piece Convict Nathaniel Lucas’ Thirst for Blood in No Way Inhibited his Cocaine Habit (Figure 17), a huge green head tilted to one side gazes out at the audience with a slightly effeminate sensibility. Like some convict dandy, Nathaniel’s portrait floats across an abstract orange floral background, his mouth open wide revealing a set of vampire fangs. Occupying both the twilight space of the industrial metropolis and the peripheral phantom zone of colonial Australia, this convict-vampire presents as a Gothic reincarnation of Benjamin’s Flaneur. Part-convict and part-vampire he thus strolls simultaneously through the streets of London and Sydney at dusk; casting his desiring eyes across a spectacle of material objects and people. At the same time the convict, as vampire, is himself also commodified within a matrix of bourgeois desires and fears. The convict, like the vampire, occupies a peripheral space within the hegemonic imagination that is replicated within the marginal locality of the convict form. The convict-vampires monstrous sexuality being confirmed by the marginalised temporal and spatial geography it and they inhabit.

Figure 17. Shannon Field, Convict Nathaniel Lucas’ Thirst for Blood in No Way Inhibited his Cocaine Habit, 2010-11. Appliqué and mixed materials. Property of the artist.

221 At the edges and in the darkness of symbolic representation the convict vampire occupies a point of semiotic contradiction, which oscillates between a fear of, and a desire for sexual/gender/class contamination. As cultural and literary theorist, Patrick Brantlinger argues in the essay “Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880 – 1914,” Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula can be read as a manifestation of cultural concerns with the return of the repressed violence of imperialism. For Brantlinger then Dracula presents as an invasion story, “in which the outward moment of imperialist adventure is reversed, a pattern foreshadowed by the returned convict theme in Botany Bay eclogues. Dracula itself is an individual invasion or demonic possession fantasy with political implications.”24 In this passage Brantlinger relates the political disturbance associated with both the convict and the vampire to an underlying cultural anxiety with individual and national possession. Both forms of possession foreground the fear that the homogenously unified subject is vulnerable to being corrupted or polluted by foreign elements. In relation to European modernity this fear of contamination circulated around a series of Othered positions involving gender, race, sexuality and class that were collectively perceived to be threats to the purity of the Imperial subject and the State.

In the appliqué, Convict Nathaniel Lucas’ Thirst for Blood in No Way Inhibited his Cocaine Habit, the polluted deviancy of convict masculinity is formulated around the layering of different fabrics and textiles together. By constructing the portrait of Nathaniel around a multitude of discarded textiles scraps a quality of foreign transplantation is consequently evoked. It is this promiscuous heterogeneity that underscores the representation of convict masculinity as deviant and monstrous. The Gothic representation of convict gender and class is thus structured within

24 Patrick Brantlinger, “Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel, 1880 – 1914,” in Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Fred Botting and Dale Townshend, vol. 1 (London: Routledge, 2004), 238.

222 an articulation of difference that speaks to the traumatic fragmentation of convict masculinity. However, when inverted or when this difference is stuttered from within, a minor–practice productively opens up around contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity and its relationship to convict representation. In relation to my art practice this productive re-animation of masculinity is intimately bound up in the incorporation of discarded fragments of materials such as the blankets and sheets used in the image Nathaniel Lucas.

The importance of vernacular materiality within the aesthetic reproduction of Australian cultural and national identity is a process that visual and cultural theorist, Marita Bullock addresses in Memory Fragments: Visualising Difference in Australia. In this text Bullock argues that the notion of trash metaphorically occupies a central position in Australia’s European imagination. As Button writes:

Trash is a highly useful metaphor for representing Australia’s imbrication with other nations because it operates metonymically for Australia’s identity as an outpost of the British Empire. Australia was ‘founded’ as Britain’s dumping ground, so to speak, and has often been conceived, since colonisation, as a ‘wasteland’.25

For Bullock the process of reconfiguring trash then whether in the guise of discarded waste allegorically speaks to a European Australian identity that is structured around a form of material cultural recycling.

European Australian identity and masculinity has from its inception been constituted around the off-cuts and discarded waste product of European modernity. In a Benjaminian sense the formulation of cultural production around the concept of ruins lies at the intersection between capitalism, history, and memory. The aesthetic turn to discarded vernacular materials productively unpacks the manner in which national discourses deal with cultural memory. As Bullock contends:

25 Marita Bullock, Memory Fragments: Visualising Difference in Australian History (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2012), 17.

223 Memory operates as an extension of a culture’s self-definition by dint of those fragments that are retained and those fragments that are rejected. Memory and culture are formed through the unceasing practices of finding and throwing away. Furthermore, the generative potential of waste facilitates new ways of figuring these collective memories, prompting new ways of remembering.26

Drawing upon Benjamin’s analysis of history and culture, trash, when utilised as a type of dialectical image, allows for the past in the form of trash to be circulated back into the present. In the process it critically contests the hegemonic version of national homogenous history and productively reanimates the fragmented identities of the marginal and the displaced.

In relation to convict Lucas the configuration of his form out of the scraps of various discarded textiles attests to both the monstrous fragmentation of convict representation and the productive contingency associated with the hybrid heterogeneity of convict masculinity. Between these two registers of signification, that is, between the desire to fold back into the binary of hegemonic masculinity and the material folding away from this hegemonic form, resides the traumatic ambiguity of contemporary European Australian identity. In a Deleuze/Guattarian sense the stuttering of masculinity through the vernacular properties of textiles, acts to re-imagine Australian heterosexual masculinity both inside and outside the hegemonic fold of gender. The haptic articulation of a textile minor-masculinity thus speaks to a masculine and national subject repetitively circulating around the traumatic configuration of the convict form as trash or waste.

In a post-colonial context this repetitive cycling through of the past opens up the possibility to re-address history through a transhistorical lens. This disruption to the linear presentation of history is a methodological approach that resonates closely with aspects of Daniel Boyd’s work. An indigenous artist and painter, Daniel’s practice is

26 Ibid., 19.

224 concerned with unpacking the ongoing cultural and political consequences of Britain’s invasion of Australia. This transhistorical critique is particularly evident in the No Beard paintings, which depict historical figures like Captain Cook as pirates. While Daniel constructs the portraits in the traditional realism associated with history painting, he cuts across this representation by inserting various pirate motifs. For instance in the painting King No Beard from 2008 (Figure 18) the imperial looking monarch is depicted wearing a pirate eye-patch, and sitting on his shoulder is a large red parrot. In other paintings from this series Boyd also inserts the Union Jack flag emblazoned with the Jolly Roger skull.

THIS IMAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED DUE TO COPY- RIGHT RESTRICTIONS

Figure 18. Daniel Boyd, King No Beard, 2008. Oil on canvas, 122 x 167.2 cm. Hayman Collection.

While the juxtaposition between these two modes of signification generates a humorous cultural clash, the pirate elements also act to open the colonel past up to the present. In effect the pirate elements can be read as markers of commercial exchange; the plastic eye-patch and the stuffed parrot signifying a post-industrial turn to role-play and fancy dress. They function as both a vernacular expression of an historical subject, as well as a vernacular mode of contemporary role-play. The intersection through the

225 imperial figure of these two modes of vernacular performance facilitates the reanimation of the past into the present. In the No Beard series, Boyd is not only drawing a political analogy between the theft and violence of piracy with that of colonialism but is also suggesting that this piratical, colonial violence continues to be experienced today.

As Luke Parker, curator of the exhibition Man: Depicting Contemporary Masculinity writes, Boyd’s practice functions as a “reassessment and reassertion of the massive and often negative impact these colonial figures had on the Indigenous peoples … they colonised. In a sense, Boyd’s works are re-history paintings, redressing historical inaccuracies and blind spots.”27 To the extent that Boyd’s post-colonial critique is structured around the representation of European male figures the gendering in his work in turn incorporates the issue of masculinity into the politics of colonial/post- colonial representation. In this context the hegemony of political European power in its interaction with indigenous cultures is calibrated through questions of masculine authority.

Understood this way, colonial hegemony as performed within the physical space of the colonies was located around and reproduced primarily through male figures of authority. Given this link between European Imperial power and the Imperial male form; Boyd’s signifiers of piracy, not only mock the pretensions to power associated with Imperialism itself but also the expression of hegemonic masculinity inexorably associated with Imperial authority. Boyd’s practice presents the indigenous side to the post-colonial discussion addressed in this thesis. In effect, the hegemonic violence wrought upon the indigenous inhabitants of Australia also intersects through the representation of convict masculinity. Like Boyd my practice repetitively uses various vernacular tropes and materials in order to re-contest the homogenous unified understanding of Australian history and identity.

27 Parker, “Myths Of Masculinity,” b5.

226 Figure 19. Shannon Field, The Origin of Species: Bust of Convict F. Dowland, 2009-2010. Mixed media, size variable. Property of the artist.

5.7 – Origin of Species

This repetitive circulation around vernacular trash in my visual practice points to the haptic relationship between history, memory and representation. In the context of the practice this turning over of memory is unpacked through the affective force of the materials themsleves. In the sculpture piece The Origin of Species: Bust of Convict F. Dowland (Figure 19), a life sized monstrous convict head made from plasticine sits on a small section of timber. Encasing the head is a large bell jar, which rests on a plywood plinth and attached to the timber section is a small plaque with the name of Fernando Dowland engraved into it. Part of a series of a three sculptures, Fernando’s green head conveys in its plasticity a sense of decay or transformation. His eyes, noise and mouth give the appearance that they are melting or slipping across his face.

One of the most striking elements of this portrait is the materiality of plasticine itself; the ‘thingness’ of the properties of plasticine, its relative softness and malleability, foreground the affective disturbance of convict masculinity. There is a sense of drag within and across convict Dowland’s head that speaks not only to the current placement of his facial features but also suggests the possibility of alternative configurations. Folding in and over itself the materiality of Dowland’s head evokes a transitional quality 227 that is analogous to the temporal deviancy of convict masculinity.

The use of the word drag here, relates both to the physical pushing and moving of the plasticine across the head as well as to Judith Butler’s performative notion of drag whose mimetic excess functions to expose the illusion and violence associated with the ideological essentialism of gender and sexuality.28 Drag disturbs the hegemonic formulation of gender because as a mode of mimetic parody it suggests that the performance of identity is regulated around memory rather than fact. Thus, to drag gender is to occupy a social performance whose mimetic expression is tied to a complex array of intersecting social, political and cultural memories and counter-memories. In Ferdinand Dowland’s bust, the re-animation of convict representation in plasticine form encompasses a mimetic performance, which in its monstrous excess drags/parodies the hegemonic expression of Imperial/colonial masculinity. It is here, lying across the surface of his face, that the drag of heterosexual masculinity resonates within the traces and marks of memory that constitute the haptic formulation of Dowland’s head.

However, the performativity of drag as it relates to the entire practice also speaks to the comic or absurd tone of the work. Ferdinand’s exaggerated Gothic monstrousness generates a sense of comic tension that works to undercut the hegemonic formulation of masculinity. Within this comic excessiveness, Ferdinand’s bust inhabits an absurd carnivalesque mode of masculinity. It drags the form of hegemonic masculinity, but does so from an outside that sits inside, from the periphery of patriarchal inscription. In this fashion absurdist black humour like drag instigates a mode of political critique though the incongruous inter-play with representation. For Marita Bullock this form of black humour as a mode of aesthetic exploration acquires an ethical dimension because it “avoids the reactionary and conservative attempt to resolve the arbitrariness of meaning. It does not reinforce cultural stereotypes, nor ‘wound a specific victim,’ but always contains a measure of ‘self mocker.’ ”29 Through this ‘self mocker’ drag and

28 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (1990; repr., New York: Routledge, 2007), 200. Citations refer to the 2007 edition

29 Bullock, Memory Fragments, 146. 228 black humour foreground an absurd performance of originality that in its repetitiveness undermines the desire to naturalise meaning.

While a sense of the ridiculous operates on various levels in the art practice, from the materiality of the work, to its comic representation and high-key colour pallet, these elements are located within a specifically absurdist framework by the juxtaposition between title and artwork. The titles play a central role in clueing the audience into this thematic component. In titles such as The Origin of Species: Bust of Convict F. Dowland, The Cinematic Remains of a Convict Porn-Star, and Convict Nathaniel Lucas’ Thirst for Blood in No Way Inhibited his Cocaine Habit, a particular emphasis is placed within the text that incongruously cuts against the artwork. In this sense there is often an excessive aspect to the title. Such as the notion of a convict with a cocaine habit or being a porn-star, which in its absurd ludicrousness acts to re-orientate the associated meaning of the artwork. In effect the work looks like one thing and means another. Through this process of inversion, drag as mimetic representation performs the absurdity of meaning located within all hegemonic discourses.

In a Benjaminian context, drag could be read as a type of dialectical image, a performative montage, whose mimetic excess, like the Baroque theatricality of death, allegorically foregrounds the fragmented becoming of non-meaning that haunts the naturalisation of cultural meaning/knowledge. For Benjamin, the trauma of European modernity is mediated through a process of remembrance and un-remembrance that plays out through the phantasmagorical experience of capitalism. If we consider art as a form of cultural drag, its performance offers the possibility to reanimate the fragments of memory that speak to the displaced subject. Formulated this way, art has the possibility to actualise the marginalised cultural memories that lie at the periphery of national discourse. To look at art then is to look at the representation of memory. Art as a mode of drag is thus a physical manifestation of the ideological impulses at work in a given society. Art disturbs and shocks the hegemonic conflation of memory with history because it suggests that neither history nor gender are innate but instead are

229 closer to a process of memory that is performed. Like make-up or clothing the memories that comprise our individual and collective understanding of masculinity, gender, and identity are constructed narratives of meaning. Their significance resides in the performance/non-performance and the re-membrance/ un-remembrance given over to them.

In an approach that closely contours with Butler’s notion of drag, Homi Bhabha contends that the mimetic performance of repetition in a post-colonial context can be also used to critically open up the hegemonic structuring of power and authority between the coloniser and the colonised. As Bhabha argues:

The repetition of the ‘same’ can in fact be its own displacement, can turn the authority of culture into its own non-sense precisely in its moment of enunciation. For, in the psychoanalytic sense, to ‘imitate’ is to cling to the denial of the ego’s limitations: to ‘identify’ is to assimilate conflictually. It is from between them, where the letter of the law will not be assigned as a sign, that culture’s double returns uncannily – neither the one nor the other, but the imposter – to mock and mimic, to lose the sense of the masterful self and its social sovereignty. It is at this moment of intellectual and physic ‘uncertainty’ that representation can no longer guarantee the authority of culture; and culture can no longer guarantee to author its ‘human’ subjects as the sign of humanness.30

It is from within this in-between-ness that the spectre of convict masculinity as an expression of cultural asignification emanates. It is from here that convict masculinity as the imposter mocks the hegemonic articulation of Imperial masculinity, in the process providing an opportunity to become a minor expression of masculine identity.

If we return then to the artwork The Origin of Species: Bust of Convict F. Dowland, the material formulation of Dowland’s head operates as a mode of performative drag and an affective expression of the cultural trauma associated with the asymmetrical representation of convict masculinity. As a result, located across the surface of convict Ferdinand Dowland’s head is a molecular array of other becomings and sensations which actualise the fragmented memories of convict masculinity. The traumatic dissonance of the work relates to a European Australian identity that oscillates

30 Homi K Bhabha, The Location of Culture (2004; repr., New York: Routledge, 2007), 195. Citations refer to the 2007 edition. 230 between denial and/or repression of its foundation as a site of sovereign waste and the continued centrality of this narrative of semiotic trash to the performance of masculinity.

In relation to Dowland’s head these anxieties concerning questions of cultural genealogy, mimeses, and repetition resonate around the mechanics of casting associated with the making of busts. The notion of a bust as a sculpted head suggests the mechanism of moulds used to mass-produce such pieces. Thus the moulding of F. Dowland and the creative materialisation/mutability of the plasticine parallel the potential moulding and remoulding of contemporary heterosexual masculinity from the originating convict form. The affective materiality of the plasticine evokes not only a sense of ongoing transformation regarding Australian masculine identity but also a form of contamination that is inescapable. Subsequently contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity is constituted around a multitude of becoming-monsters that keep replicating, splitting off and regressing back into different fragments of cultural memory.

The visual practice critically addresses the relationship between convict representation and the performance of contemporary Australian masculinity through the methodological process of repetition, montage and materiality. Locating these three methods of visual research within a shared Benjaminian and Deleuze/Guattarian framework, the practice explores the historical trauma located around Australian heterosexual masculinity through a material approach that foregrounds affect, sensation and becoming minor. Through this approach, the historical contingency of convict masculinity has been reanimated within the context of contemporary Australian identity. Juxtaposing the colonial past with the post-colonial present the work generates a series of dialectical images which actualises the continuing trauma of that semiotic displacement upon contemporary European Australian masculinity. The visual practice looks to explore the manner in which the trauma of monstrous deviancy not only closes down or restricts the performance of gender, but also opens up productive avenues for different expression of contemporary masculinity in Australia. The practice and its

231 research into these issues can be read as a material realisation of the ideological trauma embedded within Australian national identity and the unstable, repetitive, narratives that continue to circulate around this identity.

232 CONCLUSION

233 The issue of Australian heterosexual masculinity is the central concern of both the written and visual research components of my thesis. In looking to unpack gender and sexuality, questions related to the representation, performance and the possible becomings associated with masculinity have underscored this critical analysis. In addressing these concerns, the written dissertation began by asking both how, and what might be the possible relationship between the representation of convict masculinity and the performance of contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity. In situating this relationship within the context of practice-based research, the thesis has emphasised the significance of materiality as a mode of critical ideological deconstruction.

Drawing upon the work of Walter Benjamin, Gothic literature, and Deleuze and Guattari, I have sought to deconstruct contemporary Australian heterosexual masculinity by juxtaposing the historical representation of the male convict subject alongside the contemporary performance of gender. When brought together, these two disparate expressions of masculine identity function as a form of Benjaminian dialectical image. In both the dissertation and the visual practice, the dialectical image of the convict form is used to illuminate and deconstruct the illusion of a unified homogenous European Australian subject, particularly as it relates to heterosexual masculinity and national identity.

In opening up a dialogue between European Australia’s past and present, the thesis foregrounds the cultural, political and psychological elements that structure narratives of origin. The construction and reproduction of these national and personal narratives is critically framed within the context of Gothic literature. This Gothic reading of European Australia’s identity links the textual exploration of Australia’s traumatic colonial founding to the material form of my visual art practice. The re- animation of convict masculinity within the aesthetic form of the Gothic monster unpacks questions of representation as they relate to the ideological formulation of history, masculinity and culture. When related to Gothic literature, convict identity, as reproduced in the guise of the monster or the spectre, speaks to the manner in which

234 masculinity as an ideological performance turns both towards but also away from difference and repetition.

In the dissertation, the cultural trauma located around convict identity is associated with three interconnected Gothic elements. The first relates to the ability of the convict subject to mimetically reproduce the accepted hegemonic expression of masculinity. The second element concerns the mechanism of transportation itself; a process of exile that physically and symbolically displaced the convict subject, and the third is associated with the landscape of Australia, which, in the European imagination, was seen as a perverted, monstrous space. Taken together, these elements reside at the ideological epicenter of European Australia’s founding colonial moment and mark out the fault lines that continue to define our sense of identity. European Australia continues to be haunted by a sense of gendered and historical deviancy that is intimately associated with heterogeneity. The European Australian imagination is left divided on one hand turning away from our monstrous past, and on the other repetitively holding on and unable to let go of the material fragments that define its continued performance.

The past is a spectral, liminal space overrun as much by fantasy as fact. As an expression of cultural repetition it operates like a graveyard or scrap-yard, metaphorically harbouring all our collective delusions, false starts, abominations and triumphs. In this fractured incoherent chaos, the past presents as a stuttered performance in which an infinite array of facts, memories, opinions and events collide randomly and repeatedly with one another. In contrast to the random chaos that is the past, history constructs a unified illusion of narrative coherence that never originally existed. If the past as history functions not only as a mechanism for remembrance, but also as a site for forgetting or de-membrance, it is perhaps what nations choose to forget, gloss over and repress that is most inclined to haunt the collective imagination.

In my dissertation I have turned to the convict form as a means of exploring the fragments that mark out the ongoing trauma of European Australian identity and masculinity. The re-animation of the convict is used to disturb the closed historical

235 reading of Australian history and national identity. Seen through the prism of the visual practice, the cultural and political dismembering of the convict body into an array of monstrous fragments or islands of work, speaks to the centrality of the stuttered repetitive, fragmented self within the Australian imagination. While this fractured masculinity foregrounds the negative ideological representation associated with the performance of convict identity, it also underscores the possibility for the mechanism of stuttering to formulate different productive forms of masculinity.

The thesis contends that the contemporary performance of heterosexual Australian masculinity is intimately connected to the historical representation of convict masculinity. If the trauma and violence associated with this historical moment continues to impact negatively upon our contemporary sense of identity, it does so precisely because it is has been un-remembered, displaced onto the Indigenous subject. My argument contends that the productive potential to re-imagine different positive formulations of masculinity lies within the heterogenic scraps that comprise European Australian identity. However for this to come about, what is required is not a turning away from the traumas of our colonial past, but a turning towards such traumas. When done in a critical fashion, this turn towards the past is a means of disrupting the homogenous formulation of hegemonic authority.

In this dialogue with the ideological mechanisms that underscore identity, visual practice as cultural research offers one of the most important means of critically addressing the complex relationship between identity, representation and performance. As a mode of representation, visual culture intersects with affect, memory and capital in a fashion that opens the subject up to the spectral experience of Modernity. In the process, art offers a way of re-configuring the political impact of ideology as experienced within the material performance of the everyday. In relation to this thesis the material formulation of the Gothic convict monster foregrounds our present ideological moment. While the convict form illuminates where we have come from and where we are today, it also suggests that both Australian national identity and

236 heterosexual masculinity have far to travel in relation to the productive performance of difference.

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