Title: Art Journalism and the impact of ‘globalisation’: New fugal modalities of storytelling in Austral-Asian writing

Author: Ruth Skilbeck, Ph.D.

Publication: Pacific Journalism Review 14(2) 2008 pp. 139-159

Abstract:

The writing of art journalism has played a key yet little acknowledged role in the ongoing expansion of the international contemporary art world, and the multi-billion dollar global art economy. This article discusses some contradictory impacts of globalisation on art journalism-from extremes of sensationalist record-breaking art market reporting in the global mass media to the emergence of innovative modalities of story-telling in Australian independent journalistic art writing. Using aspects of Bourdieu’s field theory, the article discusses complexities of overlapping fields of economic and cultural production in art journalism and proposes a new modalitry of cultural criticism based on musical fugue form. Reflecting on two case studies-magazine feature stories on contemporary artists, Guo Jian from China and Charlie Co from the Philippines-the article considers the attribution of value, ‘the new global aesthetic’, and new forms of autonomous independent art journalism as cultural production.

Author: Dr Ruth Skilbeck

Article: ‘Exiled Writers, Human Rights and Social Advocacy Movements in Australia: a Critical Fugal Analysis.’

Publication: Cultural Studies of Rights: Critical Articulations, edited by John Erni

Publisher: Routledge

Hardcover published 2011; paperback 2014

Abstract

Whereas much work in cultural and communication studies of “the subject” and subjectivity in language has focused on deconstructive theory and critique disconnected from actual practice and people, this paper applies an innovative cultural studies approach to a journalism reflective practice research project, conducted by the author, into human rights advocacy for cases of exiled writers in immigration detention centers in Australia. In the intellectual context of “counter-hegemonic” theories that use music as an analogy for affective social relations, the paper applies what is herein termed a “fugal critical analysis,” by drawing on both musical and psychological meanings of fugue (as musical counterpoint and psychological loss of awareness of self-identity following trauma) to discuss a human rights research project. The project includes conducting interviews with an exiled Ivory Coast journalist, and an Iranian poet-musician, and their advocates, including founding member of PEN's Writers in Detention committee whose publication of an exiled writers' anthology helped secure their releases on a case by case basis. The paper argues that direct engagement with cases of social injustice—here crystallized in the encounter of the interview—brings new relevance to cultural studies research practice that can effect significant changes in perception and action; in this case shifting consideration of “the subject” from the much publicized hypothetical “death of the author” of recent theory, to actual cases of exiled endangered writers, bringing cultural studies research into institutional spaces where cases can be humanely heard and supported, not merely critiqued and deconstructed.

Book description:

At a time of global uncertainties and erosion of liberties, how will cultural studies clear a space for a parallel intellectual and political engagement with human rights practice? How will human rights thinking be liberated from its doctrinal approach to ethics and legal justice? This book forges an alliance between cultural studies and human rights scholarships, to help us better understand the changing and complex political context that continuously shapes contemporary violence. To date, interdisciplinary dialogue or institutional collaboration remains rare across the two domains, resulting in critical interpretive work appearing too vacuous at times and institutional legal work often trapped in doctrinalism. By opening a door for a new and engaging scholarship, this book will re-ignite debates and passions within communication and critical cultural studies in the search for global justice.

This book was originally published as a special issue of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.

Author: Dr Ruth Skilbeck

Article title: "First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angle Lens."

Publication: The International Journal of the Image,Volume: 3, Issue: 4, 2013

Keywords: Digital Single Lens Reflex Photography, Reflective Practice, the Mother in Art and Theory, Subjectivity, Digital Media Art, Digital Aesthetics

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18848/2154-8560/CGP/v03i04/44099

Abstract

This reflective practice essay discusses the psychology of perception and the proposition of processing trauma and loss through digital photography focusing on “Last Things” series of photographic images by the author. The paper reflexively explores the proposition of Art making as means of processing Traumatic experience, of loss, and shock of the unknown, in this case literally as well as symbolically, in images that go beyond words. The room was “empty” but needed clearing of the last things. She entered the room with camera held to her face as shield and mask and took photographs of objects that she found there. The author learned from her own response, that she turned to the visual, to images, before words; she used her digital single-lens reflex camera, with wide-angle lens. This experience shifted her focus, as arts journalist, to reflectively writing of her own experience, and the images made in those moments. Here, she also refers to other artists and critics including urban Aboriginal artists, Mary Kelly, Barthes in his “Camera Lucida”, and to further published and exhibited photographic works that she has made.

Citation: Skilbeck, Ruth. 2013. "First Things: Reflections on Single-lens Reflex Digital Photography with a Wide-angle Lens." The International Journal of the Image 3 (4): 55-67. doi:10.18848/2154-8560/CGP/v03i04/44099.

Author: Ruth Skilbeck, PhD

Article: Exiled Writers, Human Rights and Social Advocacy Movements in Australia: A Critical Fugal Analysis

Publication: Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies

Volume 7, 2010 - Issue 3: Cultural Studies of Rights: Critical Articulations

Pages 280-296 | Published online: 23 Sep 2010

https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2010.504596

Abstract

Whereas much work in cultural and communication studies of “the subject” and subjectivity in language has focused on deconstructive theory and critique disconnected from actual practice and people, this paper applies an innovative cultural studies approach to a journalism reflective practice research project, conducted by the author, into human rights advocacy for cases of exiled writers in immigration detention centers in Australia. In the intellectual context of “counter-hegemonic” theories that use music as an analogy for affective social relations, the paper applies what is herein termed a “fugal critical analysis,” by drawing on both musical and psychological meanings of fugue (as musical counterpoint and psychological loss of awareness of self-identity following trauma) to discuss a human rights research project. The project includes conducting interviews with an exiled Ivory Coast journalist, and an Iranian poet-musician, and their advocates, including founding member of PEN's Writers in Detention committee whose publication of an exiled writers' anthology helped secure their releases on a case by case basis. The paper argues that direct engagement with cases of social injustice—here crystallized in the encounter of the interview—brings new relevance to cultural studies research practice that can effect significant changes in perception and action; in this case shifting consideration of “the subject” from the much publicized hypothetical “death of the author” of recent theory, to actual cases of exiled endangered writers, bringing cultural studies research into institutional spaces where cases can be humanely heard and supported, not merely critiqued and deconstructed.

Keywords: Writers in Exile, Fugal Critical Analysis, PEN, Australia

Author: Ruth Skilbeck, PhD

Article Title: 'Re-viewing Feminist Influences in Transnational Art: A Multimodal, Fugal Analysis of Mary Kelly’s Texts of ‘Maternal Desire’'.

Publication: The International Journal of the Arts in Society: Annual Review, Vol. 4, Issue 5, 2010, pp. 15-28

Keywords: Feminist Conceptual Art, Psychoanalysis and Art, Transnational Contemporary Art, Art Criticism

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18848/1833-1866/CGP/v04i05/35719

Abstract

The 1970s women’s art movement is a foundational influence in transnational contemporary art. Developing an innovative, multimodal, fugal approach the paper discusses the formative influence of American feminist conceptual artist Mary Kelly’s representations of ‘the intricacies of maternal desire,’ in her work based on her own experience of parturition. The discussion focuses on an interview with Mary Kelly and artist son Kelly Barrie by Ruth Skilbeck at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 2008 Sydney Biennale, and includes her photographs of Kelly and Barrie within their collaborative video installation Antepartum 1973 and Astralfields and Other Manifestations 2008, exhibited at the Biennale. With reference to early pieces including Post-Partum Document 1972-78, the paper argues that not only are Kelly’s works highly significant in their own right, radically bringing together conceptual art and feminist self-based narrative art; as constitutive, canonical texts of the 1970s women’s art movement, they initiated new multimodal forms of contemporary art and modes of dialogic textual expression that have formatively influenced the development of contemporary art and its intergenerational, social and cultural communication in transnational culture.

Citation: Skilbeck, Ruth. 2010. "Re-viewing Feminist Influences in Transnational Art: A Multimodal, Fugal Analysis of Mary Kelly’s Texts of ‘Maternal Desire’." The International Journal of the Arts in Society: Annual Review 4 (5): 15-28. doi:10.18848/1833-1866/CGP/v04i05/35719.

Author: Ruth Skilbeck, PhD

Essay Title: Remembering Australia’s Forgotten Mothers: Reclaiming Lost Identity in Colonial History

Publication: Journal of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement, Vol 3, No 2 (2012)

Abstract:

This fugue narrative tells the story of the start of the author, Ruth Skilbeck’s, search to find her Australian mother’s family of descent. Her mother was adopted in Sydney in the first half of the twentieth century, and passed away in 2008 in London.

Her mother’s adoption as an infant occurred during the time of the policies of mass removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in Australia, in an era colloquially known in Australia as the “Stolen Generations.” At the time of writing, the author did not know her mother’s birth family background. This story is told as grief and as healing, like playing or listening to music, an emotional catharsis. In telling this story, the author, as art writer, reflects on the healing power of personal storytelling as communicative action in the public sphere, and starts to reflect on the significance of the absent mother, women’s art and writing, and transitional objects, in women’s cultural history of empowerment. The context of the story is Australian colonial families with hidden histories. The narrative includes digital photographs by the author.

Author: Ruth Skilbeck, PhD

Title: Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art

Publication: The International Journal of the Arts in Society: Annual Review Vol. 5, Issue 6, 2011, 261-276

Keywords: Australian Contemporary Women Artists, Urban Aboriginal Australian Artists, Indigenous Art, Global Feminisms, Fugal Writing

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18848/1833-1866/CGP/v05i06/35942

Abstract

Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian women contemporary artists made an important contribution to the foundational impacts and ongoing significance of feminism and the 1970s Women’s Art Movement on all that has followed in international contemporary art. Whereas distance from Euro-centric culture was once lamented by Australian settlers as a tyranny, critical distance from colonial power discourses has functioned as a strength for women artists who use their art to gaze back not only at colonial oppression of Indigeneity, but also at western art’s historical hegemonic male representation of women in the public cultural domain. Women artists do this by representing themselves. Fiona Foley, one of Australia’s foremost artists and a curator, academic and writer, has since the 1980s in her art confronted political issues of Indigeneity and identity as a woman in a cultural history of trauma and dispossession- bearing witness to her cultural heritage as a descendent of the Badtjala people, who were forcibly removed from K’gari or Thoorgine (Fraser Island) in the early twentieth century. The paper applies an innovative multimodal fugal critical analysis – drawing on psychological and musical meanings of fugue – to discuss Foley’s work; the paper draws on an interview the author conducted with Fiona Foley at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, including photographs of the artist and images of her work. The analysis focuses on Foley’s site specific installation at Cockatoo Island at the Sydney Biennale 2010, and her recent survey show at the MCA.

Citation: Skilbeck, Ruth. 2011. "Gazing Boldly Back and Forward: Urban Aboriginal Women Artists and New Global Feminisms in Transnational Art." The International Journal of the Arts in Society: Annual Review 5 (6): 261-276. doi:10.18848/1833-1866/CGP/v05i06/35942.

Title: Arts Journalism and exiled writers: A case study of fugal reflexive practice

Author: Ruth Skilbeck, Ph.D.

Publication: Pacific Journalism Review Vol. 15(2) 2009 pp. 132-152

Abstract:

Arts journalism and reflective practice intersect in a new field of ‘journalism as research’ (Bacon 2006). This article takes an innovative approach informed by the multimodal, musical and psychogenic fugue to discuss a case study of arts journalism reflexive practice. The journalistic research topic is the impact of the traumatic journey of exiled writers on their creative writing, the empathetic effects of trauma and courage on their advocates and the impacts of researching trauma on the researcher. The journalistic interview-based articles discussed in the case study are on exiled writers in Australia, Iranian poet-musician Mohsen Soltany Zand and Ivory Coast political journalist Cheikh Kone. In reflecting on processes of writing of the stories, the author begins to outline the foundation of an innovative, critical fugal methodology of reflexive practice form modes and pieces of arts journalism.

Keywords:

arts journalism, creative writing, exiled writers, fugue, multimodality, trauma

Author: Ruth Skilbeck

Publication type: Conference proceedings

Title: Through the ‘I’s’ of Lost Time: Proust’s Performative Fugue of Temps Perdu

Author: Ruth Skilbeck

Publication: time.transcendence.performance: Refereed Conference Proceedings

Publisher: Monash Arts Online, 2010

Type: Published conference paper presented at time.transcendence. performance, conference, Monash University 2009.

Abstract

Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is written as an extended narrative/speech-act of memory. The paper considers the fugue poetics of Proust’s act of writing transcendence performatively realised through multiple voices of selves in Lost Time, as manifestations of the musical and psychological meanings of fugue. The almost interchangeable mechanisms of time and space suggested by Bergson’s notions of time as le temps and la durée and his related notion of élan vital, are discussed in relation to the contrapuntal mechanisms – or textual counterpoint – of Proust’s novel contrasted to Deleuze’s reading of Proust’s Lost Time as “not simply ‘time past’; it is also time wasted, lost track of” (Deleuze 2000, 3). The paper concludes that temps perdu articulates the conceptual space of Proust’s writing contained and inscribed within the narrative text which is accessed, or capable of being accessed and set into motion by, and through, the writer’s and reader’s attention.

Key words

Proust, Bergson, writing transcendence, Lost Time, fugue poetics, involuntary memory

http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/performance/files/2012/09/proceedings-skilbeck-through-the-i-of-lost-time-ttp-conference.pdf

Conference webpage

https://arts.monash.edu/news/time-transcendence-performance/

An excerpt from an interview conducted by Ruth Skilbeck with Mary Kelly and Kelly Barrie at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney where Mary Kelly and Kelly Barrie had a dual installation at the Sydney Biennale in 2008.

The excerpt is published in Chapter One of The M Word: Real Mothers in Contemporary Art, edited by Myrel Chernick and Jennie Klein, Demeter Press, Toronto, 2011.