Alternative title: Art as Parodic Practice
Issue Details: First known date: 2015... no. 33 October 2015 of TEXT Special Issue est. 2000 TEXT : Special Issue Website Series
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Contents

* Contents derived from the 2015 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
Art as Parodic Practice, Marion Campbell , Dominique Hecq , Jondi Keane , Antonia Pont , single work essay
May 68 : Parodic Rehearsals of the Future in Lacan and Duras, Dominique Hecq , single work criticism
'Within the context of May 68, Lacan’s The Other Side of Psychoanalysis (2007 [1969- 70]) and Duras’ Destroy, She Said (1970 [1969]) are significant titles. They describe a time of profound socio-political disruption and irruption. They signify a rupture with history that manifests itself in parodic terms, announcing further textual revisions and reversions while bearing witness to a desire for the radicalisation of conceptions of difference. Fifty years on, these works appear as traversed and gathered together by a consistent intentional movement visible through a multiplicity of parodic manoeuvres now perceived as ‘style’. This understanding becomes possible through an interpretation of language that does not suppose a conscious subject who expresses it: ‘style’ speaks itself and ‘it’ writes itself. This is the condition of its transgressive force and authority. It is a style that repudiates the idea of accepted, institutionalised, or canonised form. It is therefore possible to read the style of Lacan and Duras as a symbolic stripping of established socio-political structures that paradoxically unveils more questions than those activated by the May events. This paper explores the capacity to revolutionise in texts by Lacan and Duras produced around May 68 which have had an enduring impact on literature, literary theory and critical inquiry. ' (Publication abstract)
To the Very Ground of Meaning, to Vary the Ground of Meaning, Jondi Keane , single work criticism

'Parody may be understood as the absorption of a revolutionary impulse into the everyday production of meaning as continuous variation and soft subversion. Considered in this way, parody is transformative because it operates on the components within a system of meaning and/or the context, logic or spatial perspective that grounds the possibility of meaning. It is the conditions under which shared meaning, sense and sensation depend that I aim to unpack in order to suggest the ways in which parody can alter a person’s relationship to the world. Approaching parody as a mode of lived abstraction and an embodied approach to affective self-organisation, body-environment co-construction and a challenge to identity, it becomes possible to move from formal concerns to a set of transformative practices. Thus parody indicates where the anchors of embodied, embedded, extended, enacted and affective are dug in and hold identity and the ground of meaning in a steady state. This article examines how parody moves from the impulse to overthrow and invert – ‘Beneath the street, The beach’ – to a collective impulse that moves the ground of meaning into a reconfigurative process that is allows totalised systems of meaning to collide and intersect. What is left is not the rubble and ruins of meaning but revitalised fragments, stems cells of meaning ready-tobe-remade. A lineage of parodic works will be paraded and discussed that directly address the tacit relation of ground, horizon, orientation and position. This parody parade will form the basis of a critique and the analysis of the ontological orientations that for example, opposing systems of perspective insert as the very ground of meaning. The implication leads to the assertion that all descriptions of the world, universe and the cosmos are parodies in search of an origin. ' (Publication abstract)

The Culture of Complaint, or ‘Postmodernism, an Ode’ Being an Melencholly Lament upon the Death of Wm. Shakspeare & Other Master-peeces of Ancient Beautie and Tragedie, Darren Tofts , single work criticism

'The term ‘postmodernism’ persists in emanating a stain of disrepute, inscrutability and, in the context of this paper, odium particularly associated with its place within pedagogy in school and the University.' (Publication abstract)

Implicit Acts of Filth : The Parodic Virtues of Cleanliness, Aritha van Herk , single work criticism
'From ‘the Wolf’ Wolfe in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction to the laundress in Kate Grenville’s Joan Makes History, the act of nettoyage is called into service as an intertextual gesture toward decoding all that is virtuous (or not), all that is filthy (or not). As an inevitable repetition or agent of redundancy, complete with all the recursive energies of concealment and discovery, cleaning and the cleaner serve a parodic practice that has been entirely overlooked in its representation in various forms of narrative (fiction, film, and image). Parody may be, as Hutcheon claims, ‘a more restricted form, in pragmatic terms, than allusion or quotation’ (1985: 50), but it has also not been accorded the power that it wields in a quotidian presence, its gestural and recitative marking performing a contestation that is ignored because it is ‘unmarked’ (60). In short, its association with the erotic and the criminal, erasure and commodification, make nettoyage a transgressive site in disguise. Scouring and laundering’s ‘transcontextualizing’ power resides in its invisibility, and its work as an ‘authorized transgression’ (Hutcheon 1985: 101) enunciates a persistent parodic presence in an aesthetically incognizant world. The play of disinfectant as part of Foucault’s ‘writing of things’ thus alludes to parody’s most powerful affect: its connection to the most ordinary and quotidian of gestures, doubled by cultural aesthetic and instructional pragmatism.' (Publication abstract)
Pathology or Intervention? – Deleuze’s Masochism and Its Relation to Parody, Antonia Pont , single work criticism

'In his 1967 work, Presentation of Sacher-Masoch – Coldness and Cruelty (2007), Gilles Deleuze famously distinguishes the symptomatologies commonly designated by the names Masochism and Sadism, arguing that despite their shared feature of algolagnia, they are more rigorously approached as two very distinct regimes, having nothing to do with the ‘economy’ of the other. In the work’s preface, Deleuze also notes about Sacher-Masoch himself: ‘His whole oeuvre remains influenced by the problem of minorities, of nationalities and of revolutionary movements’ (2007: 9). Deleuze identifies that, within Masoch’s oeuvre, the masochist is he (normally a ‘he’) who insists on the contract. This insistence is neither to honour any particular contract or contracting per se, nor to safeguard himself within it, but to perform, through parodying it to its letter and pushing its operation towards its own limit, the inherent injustice that is its inexorable outcome. This article seeks to explore, using Masochistic ‘humouring’ or mockery of the contract as example, what might constitute a practice of intervention in regimes of power, and in which instances these iterations serve instead only as gestures of complicity with the injustices of the established logics. The article seeks to clarify, at the level of mechanism, a region of parody’s slippery operation, one which would determine the criteria for it to be intervention, as opposed to functioning as compliance and ‘bare repetition’ or ‘repetition of the Same’ (see Deleuze 2004: 27).' (Publication abstract)

In the Museyroom : A Speculative Genealogy of Post-criticism, Stephen Abblitt , single work criticism
'This paper explores the compositional processes of this post-critic, his errant and wandering trajectories, as he faces a crisis of academic genre. Addressing a parodic tone recently adopted in critical writing, it performatively enacts what Ulmer terms ‘post-criticism’, a strategy of textual demonstration (explanation, exposition, exhibition; but also protest) and détournement (a critical copying and correction, remixing; morphological mimicry as textual transgression and politico-poetic subversion) which applies the devices of modernist art to critical representations. The narrative conceit of an imaginary museum exhibition is deployed to demonstrate this more oblique style, exemplary, dramatic, performative, tracing its speculative genealogy through some convergent twentieth-century avant-gardes.' (Publication abstract)
After Motherwell, After Manet and After Goya : The Performative Power of Imaging and the Intensely Present, Barbara Bolt , single work criticism

'In a post-appropriative or remix culture, what is at stake in ‘borrowing’ from historical images that have at their core an outrage at an injustice being perpetrated on a people? What are the implications of such acts of borrowing for rethinking an ethics of appropriation? This essay draws on an analysis of the dynamics of the image to argue that the ‘effect’ or ‘empathic suffering’ that we may experience when viewing an appropriation do not merely arise from representation alone, but more significantly emerge through the forces and ghosts that lie beneath and structure representation. Through this approach it argues that the work of art may enable the ghosts to speak. In giving voice to these ghosts, the work may just do justice to the histories to which the work in indebted.' (Publication abstract)

Reverberation and the Parodic : An Invitation to the Spaces of Sound, Josephine Scicluna , single work criticism
'In The Politics of Aesthetics Jacques Rancière speaks of artistic practices ‘as ways of “doing and making” that intervene in the general distribution of ways of doing and making’ (2013: 8). ‘Reverberation’ in the various dimensions explored by this paper is the compelling and parodic force, which signals the transformative potential of the spaces of music, word and sound collaborations. This paper will present the mixed impulse of parody as repetition with difference in Deleuze’s sense, or ironic ‘transcontextualisation’ (Hutcheon 2000: 32), contextualised by Foucault’s heterotopic thought, Steve Reich’s minimalist music, and Brian Eno’s recognition of ambient sound in 1975 (Howard 2004: 91). Also explored is Hutcheon’s investigation of the etymology of parody as ‘counter-song’, which suggests intimacy and accord. The latter understanding of parody will be of particular importance in a discussion of New Yorkbased band, The National. ' (Publication abstract)
Dissident Laughter : Historiographic Metafiction as Parodic Intervention in Benang and That Deadman Dance, A. Frances Johnson , single work criticism
'Benang: From the Heart and That Deadman Dance are both seminal examples of postcolonial historical novels by Kim Scott that consider ‘how much speaking’ and ‘what sort of speaking’ can occur in relation to portrayals of Indigenous subjects and traumatic histories of dispossession. Both Scott’s novels differently recruit a range of parodic narrative techniques to critique the monologistic language of colonialism. This essay examines how Scott recruits historiographic metafiction in Benang: From the Heart and That Deadman Dance to generate new metaphors of colonial power relations within the novel as heteroglossic text.' (Publication abstract)
Having Sex with Capitalism : Parodic In-citation in the Prose Poem Sequence, Marion Campbell , single work criticism
'In his Spleen de Paris or Petits poèmes en prose [Little Prose Poems] Baudelaire (1869) forges an instrument of supple and radical potential, declaring the prose poem a ‘dangerous’ hybrid, which he wills elastic enough and staccato enough, to register the flows, jolts and distractions for the flâneur in the increasingly industrialised Paris. Here, by the mid-19th century, plate glass and gas lighting enable conspicuous consumption. It is most strikingly the romantic-erotic and the relation between poet and his delicious, execrable wife, his inescapable, pitiless Muse (Baudelaire 1989: 177] that provides the nexus for radical questioning of the whole socio-political economy. Departing from Johnson’s Défigurations (1979) and using Irigaray’s (1984) hypothesis that the economy of sexual difference is the founding trope for the discursive and thus political economy of differences – of culture, ethnicity and class – this article first looks at the way Baudelaire activates the heterosexual relation as a site for social critique. It examines how Perec continues Baudelaire’s prose poetry experiment, offering, pre-May 1968, a revolutionary critique of desire by exploiting formal constraints to deconstruct still further the consumer subject of capitalism. It then investigates Brossard’s ‘hologrammatic’ challenge (1991) to patriarchal regimes of representation and the forms of desire they outlaw. Finally, it suggests how new work by Walwicz (2015) develops and displaces this radical inheritance.' (Publication abstract)
Eat, Ania Walwicz , extract autobiography

'“EAT” is an excerpt from Horse, a work in progress, previously unpublished material, autobiographical reference, a personal diary of the fictive self. The text forms part of a PhD dissertation,’l format of polyvalence and polyphony enacts the engagement with psychoanalysis. The photographic images form a part of the theatre performance now in progress. The writing stages an interplay of prose/poetry and theory.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Last amended 28 Aug 2024 10:12:57
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