'Going underground: art history and the people's railway'

Journal of Transport History 35 (1), 2014

Stedelijk Studies Journal, 2018

As we set out to construct the history of exhibitions from our contemporary vantage point, one of the central questions to consider is the relationship between models that emerged in the postwar European context—between the years 1945 and 1972—and current artistic and curatorial practices. The genealogies that we establish are not only significant because of their institutionalizing power, authorizing the preeminence of specific artists, curators, and exhibitions while potentially obscuring others; they also allow us to reflect on the connections and ruptures between the postwar period and our contemporaneity. As an art historian, a crucial aspect of my own project of writing about modern and contemporary art is to explore both the critical “potentialities” and historical “blind spots” of aesthetic paradigms and propositions. To understand how traditional disciplinary narratives have been formed and, for the most part, continue to maintain the hegemonic role of Western modernism and...

City, 2015

This paper discusses an unrealized urban plan from the 1960s that proposed to build a network of tunnel motorways and monorails underneath central London. By reframing this plan as a work of fiction, I want to underscore how literary geography perpetuates a limited tradition that merely focuses on fiction produced in or about the city, and not literature produced by or for the city. In the process of re-reading and, to an extent, reclaiming these plans from the National Archives, I argue that these abandoned visions provide an interesting text for literary geographers to access a genre of literature that bisects the built environment and fiction. The scope for this tactic is potentially vast, but a renewed look at unbuilt, unrealized or abandoned architectural texts and similar unconventional forms, would allow for literary scholars to perform a greater, more active role than before: from connecting their analysis directly to the built environment and the contemporary moment in urban space, to discovering new unbuilt works that disrupt established cultural narratives.

Labyrinths, Mazes and Related Art Forms, 2023

This paper will provide a broader context for understanding the labyrinth design using the research of the American art historian, Carl Schuster.

2021

The paper serves as a reflection reflection on Motoi Yamamoto’s salt art installation 'Labyrinth' placed in the Jesuit Church of St Peter in Cologne in 2010. The reflection delves into the significance of the labyrinth in Medieval Christian art, literature and architecture as a starting point to consider the significance of the artwork to the modern viewer. The materiality of Yamamoto's installation likewise offers a possible reflection on suffering through a theological lens. The paper was prepared in partial fulfillment of the course "The Way of Beauty: Discovering Faith through Art" organised by the Pastoral Formation Institute in 2021.

REFERENCES, NOTES AND QUOTATIONS ARCHETYPE: GOING UNDERGROUND / THE CRUEL SCENE OF THE IMAGE The virtue of transcendentalism does not lie in rendering realism illusory, but in rendering it astonishing. i.e. apparently unthinkable, yet true, and hence eminently problematic. - Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude Being an artist doesn’t take much, just everything you got. Which means of course, that as the process is giving you life, it is also bringing you closer to death. But it’s no big deal. They are one and the same and cannot be avoided or denied. So when I totally embrace this process, this life/death, and abandon myself to it, I transcend all the gibberish and hang out with the gods. It seems to me that that is worth the price of admission. - Hubert Selby, Jnr The Theatre of Cruelty has been created in order to restore to the theatre a passionate and convulsive conception of life, and it is in this sense of violent rigour and extreme condensation of scenic elements that the cruelty on which it is based must be understood. This cruelty, which will be bloody when necessary but not systematically so, can thus be identified with a kind of severe moral purity which is not afraid to pay life the price it must be paid. -Antonin Artaud, The Theatre of Cruelty, in The Theory of the Modern Stage (ed. Eric Bentley), Penguin, 1968, p.66 TRISTAN [...] today with a bleeding wound I will capture Isolde! Ha, my blood! Flow joyfully! She who will close My wound forever Comes to me like a hero, To save me. Let the world pass away As I hasten to her in joy! ISOLDE Tristan! Beloved! TRISTAN What, do I hear the light? The torch, ha! The torch is put out! To her! To her! What, hear I the Light? -Richard Wagner, Tristan and Isolde Marcel Duchamp: I went to a conference. A round table, which took place in Philadelphia, where I was asked, "Where are we going?" Me, I simply said, "The great fortune of tomorrow will hide itself. Will go underground." In English it's better than in French - "Will go underground." It'll be necessary that it dies before being known. Me, in my opinion, if there is an important fellow from now in a century or two - well! He will have hidden himself all his life in order to escape the influence of the market… completely mercenary [laughs] if I dare say. -Marcel Duchamp, in interview, Jean Neyens (RTBF 1965) 1962 Desublimated: in some cases, however, a condition of ‘repressive desublimation’ results. Excess and sexual abandon are marshalled towards soporific ends of entertainment culture and organised leisure, and the appearance of freedom is accommodated and indeed, actively cultivated as a substitute for more potent forms of genuine protest. Mess, filth, scatter and decomposition in this case are mere scatological regressions, rather than emancipatory gestures. -Eva Diaz – A Critical Glossary of Space and Sculpture from Unmonumental, The Object in The 21st Century, Catalogue, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York A psychic screen, protecting and denying phenomenal perception from acknowledging bad history, (also depriving access to the archetype), might reflect cruelty as the absence of an imaginal existence, in bloodless, bodiless simulations – more devastating than Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty. Artaud names the ‘unpower’ as an apparatus (dispositif) of the underground, the source of an inspiration of dramaturgy (of love). As subjects of love, the theatre (of cruelty) is an act of love. With the extreme gift of lucidity, what is exposed is an exigency of disruption that puts into question the givens of every culture, and in particular, those of the contemporary world. The imagination of death is replaced by injunction to be reread as the death of the imagination. The radical corruption of love, and the imaginal cruelty of the image, move where, Jean Baudrillard suggests, all has but disappeared. The apparatus he speaks of, in the ecstasy of a total exposure, is held captive too, witness of an irrevocable cruelty, televised, for example as the (melo)drama of terrorism, in the image of the hostage and the terrorist. The artist as subject is obliged to perform at another level of antisocial exposure, the proper ethical dimension, to either consent to the Law, Society; or not, like Antigone; as an affirmation, (perforce) to go underground...

2010

Editorial: In guest-editing this issue of Artlink, I have not been interested in unearthing the work of 'Australia's hottest young underground artists'. In time, they will unearth themselves, and they don't need my help. What I do want to talk about, and what some of the writers in this issue of Artlink tackle, are more literal underground phenomena: guerrilla gardening, mining and indigenous land claims, the digging of holes as a form of art, and ruminations on rubbish-filled ponds beneath city expressways. In other words, I'm interested in the underground as a relationship with (and under) the ground itself.

This paper proposes that the symbolic image of the classical seven-circuit labyrinth with its single meandering path to a central goal represents a calendar. This is not a maze with multiple paths and dead ends. Walking a maze offers too many variations and choices. A calendar consists of repeatable patterns duplicating the circle dance of the heavens. By deconstructing the symbol and applying Hesiodʼs Works and Days, this research attempts to demonstrate how the labyrinth represented time to the ancients. The labyrinth offers two expressions of time. One is finite and measurable while the other is infinite and eternal. When these two concepts of time are unbalanced, heroic journeys into the underworld or searching the inner psyche are called for. It is this understanding of time that connects the present day use of the labyrinth as a tool for meditation or as a symbolic referent in works of art.

2020

According to Andrew Thacker, reviewer of David Welsh's 2010 book Underground Writing: the London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf, "It is getting rather crowded down there in the field of what might be called 'subterranean cultural studies'" (Thacker 1). Thacker goes on to cite a plethora of texts which have explored the potential of The London Underground as a vehicle for cultural analysis. Known generically since 1868 as "The Tube" (Martin 99), The Underground has been the setting for a sub-genre of writings and films representing an imagined space culturally conflated with the "Underworld", with all that this implies in terms of classical mythology, darkness, criminality, and death (Pike 1-2). As Thacker puts it: "The Underground is something of a social unconscious of the city, operating as the site of fears and dreams about urban life, and many writers have taken the quotidian experience of subterranean travel as the setting or trope for understanding modernity itself" (Thacker 1). Surprisingly, despite this recent upsurge of interest in the subterranean and a number of poetic references in Welsh's book, one topic which has not been the object of close academic study has been the cultural position of poetry in The London Underground, notwithstanding the central contribution of creative writers such as Baudelaire, Blake, Apollinaire, Eliot, and other poetic voices to our current understanding of urban space. In the light of the generally bleak vision of the city offered by canonical poets such as those above and what David Pike refers to as contemporary Western culture's "obsession with the underground" (Pike 1), it is difficult not to consider the role of poetry in the Tube as one inspired by radicalism and counter-culture. Pike, like many writers of fiction and 20 th century film directors, directly associates the subterranean world with the detritus of progress which the "civilised" world strives daily to ignore: the sub-ground zero