Here I am, in the “visual arts classroom” as it exists in the midst of the 2020 COVID-19 precautions. I t was while I was digging through my previous essays to help my senior students prepare for their HSC essay writing, that I stumbled across this paper from 2018 –…
“The sound is vibrate in itself or by itself: it is not only, for the sonorous body, to emit a sound, but it is also to stretch out, to carry itself and be resolved in to vibrations that both return it to itself and place it outside itself” Jean-Luc Nancy…
The following is the second of a two-part series. The first can be found here. Anthony Gardner, in a piece commissioned by GAM, proclaims a difference, in that one needs to “evaluate the possible shifts from the postcolonial to the global”, pointing out that there are “as many postcolonial studies…
The following is the first of a two-part series. In Contemporary Art as Global Art: A Critical Estimate, Hans Belting sets out to explain how the concept of ‘global art’ since the late 1980’s has transgressed our traditional understandings of art history, modernism’s ideals of “progress and hegemony”, and our…
The following is the second of a two-part series. The first can be found here. In the reaction to the photographs of Innes and Kardashian, both of which fit only tangentially within the boundaries of selfie, the meaning of “selfie” overruled and defined the means of production by which the…
The following is the first of a two-part series. Epistemologically, recognizing the importance of routines for media use, means that text and context cannot always be distinguished from one another.” —Joke Hermes (1993) Introduction When I think of the selfie, I am always drawn to a particular moment in my…
The following is republished from Religious Theory. It is the last of a three-part series. The first can be found here, the second here. End Times fiction must be distinguished from other literary genres by its conspicuous absence of local color, its lifeless mise-en-scène and, in particular, writing that relays no vivid…
The following is republished from Religious Theory. It is the second of a three-part series. The first can be found here. End Times fiction’s unrelenting focus on human sinfulness and unworthiness, a focus that reflects the defining tenet of fundamentalist anthropology, leaves out of account the doctrine of the Imago Dei.…
The following is republished from Religious Theory. A flaw at the heart of End Times fiction gravely weakens its credibility as Christian literature. Its stock characters lack the degree of interiority required for convincing narratives of encounters with the transcendent. The formulaic style of characterization eviscerates Christian experience. This deficiency…
This article is republished from The New Polis, Dec. 23, 2019. Neil Jordan’s film Byzantium (2012), which tells the story of a pair of mother/daughter vampires on the run from a male-only secret society of vampires known as Brotherhood, has been widely read as a feminist approach to the literary convention of…