Faculty of Creative Arts

Artist and teacher Kurt Brereton's creative output grows like a wild ginger plant. He will stage a show of animations one moment, a performance the next, followed by an exhibition of paintings alongside a sculpture display. Branching off at another angle he produces a bilingual ...

282] Recent scholarship has explored the mythical function of news reporting. A diverse set of studies has shown that when news takes mythic shape it can perform both a community-building cultural role and/or a boundary-setting ideological role. This article looks at theories of myth and the way it functions in both journalism and law.

Review of: Terry, Janice J., US Foreign Policy in the Middle East, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2005,
ISBN 0 7453 2258 1, 160 pp., US$24.95.

Janice Terry uses opera as a motif and structuring device for her interesting study of Middle East politics under the US presidencies of Carter and Ford.

Jack Bauer of the television series 24 is a highly charged contemporary mythic character who exists in powerful relationship to past and present real world and fictional figures. If Rambo was a classic Reagan era cinematic "hard body" (Jeffords 1994) Jack is the archetypal Bush "smart

Review of: Western, Jon, Selling Intervention and War: The Presidency the Media and the American Public, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2005, ISBN 0 8018 8109 9, 336 pp., A$37.95.

In a series of five fascinating case studies, Jon Western develops a complex model of the power plays and tussle for real-world effect amongst Washington’s foreign policy elites.

'Jihad Jack' Thomas was arrested in Pakistan in January 2003 under suspicion of being an al-Qaeda supporter or operative. Thomas's guilt or innocence has been disputed ever since as police, politicians, the courts, the media and the public have grappled with who Jack Thomas is, what he believes and what he has or has not done in the name of those beliefs.

Early on in Tony Maniaty’s Shooting Balibo we come across Herman Melville, Michelangelo Antonioni and John Dos Passos. We quickly get the message that this is as much a journey of the imagination as it is a travelogue, memoir or investigation. Maniaty tells us that when he went to East Timor as an ABC reporter in 1975, just before the ill-fated journalists, his travel reading was Melville’s Moby Dick. Here we get a sense of the young journalist’s ambition, his questing commitment to follow the story, just as Ahab follows his whale.

The public discourse about marriage oscillates between a story of the ideal and a story of the everyday. A range of symbolic references or myths are mobilised in media stories about marriage; this is particularly evident in the polarised debate around same-sex marriage. This article identifies and explores three of the myths that underlie the rhetoric in same-sex marriage stories: 1) the evolution/revolution myth; 2) the apocalypse myth and 3) the myth of the child. It also argues that the production of such stories has effects on the realm of ‘intimate citizenship’ (Plummer 1995) and that it is through this contested storytelling that new identities and their attendant rights become possible.

Elite classical music programs continue to focus teaching in Western Classical traditions where the emphasis is on technical virtuosity in instrumental or vocal performance. In this paper we discuss group activities and assessments used in two Creative Arts disciplines (Performance and Journalism), at an Australian regional university, as examples of subjects which provide ‘real world’ experience in order to promote resilience and tenacity in students. We incorporate narratives collected from students in performance and journalism to illustrate the value of recreating the complex division of labour of real world art practice, famously described by Becker (1982), as part of the musical learning experience. The paper concludes with reflections on how collaborative assessments/teaching activities can be developed to ensure the delivery of resilience and tenacity as a threshold learning outcome in a classical music course.

This thesis is an exegesis that complements my installation project ‘Mitoni, Lurik and the Stitches of Lament’. My project was inspired by my personal participation in a traditional Javanese Mitoni seventh month pregnancy ritual in 2006 and was fueled by my concerns in response to the changing socio-cultural environment in Indonesia.
I begin my thesis looking at the legacy of Joseph Beuys’ social sculpture philosophy and the effect this has had on Indonesian installation practice and its connection with the history of installation and contemporary art in Indonesia. I start my research with a history of the legacy of the Indonesian New Art Movement (Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru), and I write of how the practice of installation art has had an important role as a social sculpture that conveys artist’s social conscience. Central to this project is an investigation of how ethnographic features taken from fragmented narratives in ritual and cloths become artistic and political strategies in the practice of installation art to connect visual art with discussions of personal, social and cultural dimensions from woman artist’s perspectives as in those created by the second wave feminist artists and Asian female artists such as Kimsooja, Sheela Gowda and Arahmaiani.
Practice-led research is employed as a central methodology in this project, intertwining with material culture and bricolage. The material culture of Mitoni and Lurik cloths is explored through my direct participation and observation in the Mitoni ritual (2006) and the conduction of field research in Semarang city and Cawasan village, Central Java, Indonesia (2011) to interview a Javanese ritual facilitator and the Lurik cloths weavers. Stitching together the threads of ethnographic narratives in the Mitoni ritual and the lurik cloths with the socio-political content of Indonesian installation art history and current socio-cultural issues, the body of work and thesis for this project is constructed through the process of bricolage. As the result of the bricolage, the connectedness between ethnographic narratives in traditional ritual and textile with artist’s concern to the socio-cultural and political issues is revealed in the installation practice.
I concluded through my project that installation art not only has a role to play as a social sculpture but is also a form that holds together eclectic interconnected stories. Installation art practice enabled me to become a stitcher of stories and wounds, as well as a conduit between the past and the present. This project contributes insights into installation art practice through the specifics of my personal experience of the Mitoni ritual and the lurik cloths, and my extrapolation of these specifics into broader socio-cultural dimensions. I highlight the interconnected links between the practice of installation art and ritual, the ritual and the textile, the traditional practice and the contemporary art, the past and the present, myths and realities, and the artist’s social conscience with visual arts practice.