SARU Research Events
Events by Year
Upcoming Events
June
Collaborations: Creative Partnerships in Music
Creative processes in the arts have been under renewed scrutiny over the last decade in a variety of ways. These have included the increasing links made between ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ that also involve the blurring of business and artistic work; how creativity is measured or ‘captured’; and tensions between older, Romantic notions of the creative process that stress the individual artist, and more contemporary theories that emphasise group/systematic processes.
Creative partnerships are common in music. They can be poisonous, vexed, tragic, difficult, strange, mercurial, placid, business-like, un-emotive, sadistic and masochistic. They are also essential. Twentieth-century music is inconceivable without the partnerships of Jagger and Richards, Plant and Page, Stravinsky and Balanchine, Cage and Cunningham, Warwick and David, Reed and Cale, or Davis and Evans. We welcome explorations of music creativity and collaboration across all music genres and contexts of production. By ‘collaboration’ we mean loose or tight associations between artists and surrounding personnel; and the forms of artistic endeavour which involve co-operation, partnerships, strategic alliances, and/or a group aesthetic as the basis for music production.
Collaborative contexts for papers might include famous and infamous collaborations between songwriters; studio producers and artists, or musical directors and artists – Frank Sinatra and Nelson Riddle); artist managers and artists, such as Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols); inter-family partnerships; or collaborations that challenge legal, political, artistic or social convention (for example, Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn).
A key subtext of the seminar is to explore/discuss why partnerships are important in musical creativity, what makes them work and why they fail.
Recordings may be downloaded from the seminar's home page.
August
Socio-aesthetics: A symposium on aesthetics, culture and social life
International conference on social aesthetics cosponsored by Monash University and the University of Copenhagen
This symposium aims to bring together scholars from communications, sociology, cultural studies, urban studies, management, organization studies, material culture studies, marketing and consumption studies to debate the merits of aesthetic approaches to culture and social life. The underlying premise is that aesthetics is no longer the preserve of art historians and philosophers of art, rather changes in society, culture, economy, urban dynamics and everyday life, push us towards considering the aesthetic components of traditionally non-aesthetic domains.
More information and symposium report may be found here.
October
time.transcendence.performance conference
The idea to hold a conference on time transcendence performance (ttp) emerged from a panel presented at the 2006 ADSA Conference, Being There, held at The University of Sydney. In subsequent discussions concerning how the panel could sustain its inquiry, it was agreed that a conference format would provide a platform for tangible theoretical and practice investigations.
TTP is a three day conference at taking place at Monash University, Clayton and Caulfield Campuses and other nominated sites. The event will be convened under the auspices of the School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, with the co-operation of other associated organizations and institutions, including the recently constituted Association for Phenomenology in Performance Studies. The conference will draw together diverse practices within the performing arts which emphasize time, timing and temporality. The theoretical framing of the conference will be unique in its engagement with phenomenological perspectives that articulate these themes. Proposed encounters between conference participants, students and local and international high profile practitioners will initiate research rich dialogue of the phenomena we call time. A convergence of papers, practices and performances will enable inquiries to intersect in a shared context.
November
SARU Panel at the Art.Media.Design | Writing Intersections Conference, Swinburne University of Technology, November 18-19.
The panel will present a roundtable session on the contribution of ‘place-image-journey-locus’, ‘things-artefacts-objects-design’ and ‘body-theatre-performance-space’ to the act of creation and its representation. The panelists will discuss:
Janine Burke, ‘Writing Intimate Space’
Creativity is a place. Memory is an image. The artistic process itself is a journey, a specific one, the return to a lost and cherished childhood realm, the original source of inspiration and identity. For the case studies I investigate - Georgia O’Keeffe, Claude Monet and Emily Kame Kngwarreye - re-creating Eden was a life-changing, art-making, healing rite that provides a map of their careers and an index of their subject matter.
Eduardo de la Fuente, ‘Bridges, Doors, Handles, Picture Frames and Ruins: Georg Simmel and an Artefactual Theory of Communication’
We are what we hold, rather than what we say. The paper examines the central place of things and artefacts in human communication, and the role that objects—as externalizations of the self, consumption and identity—play in aesthetic experience.
Peter Snow, ‘Theatre Performs Culture’
Performances are a central means by which cultures bring themselves into being. Performances, in their liveness, their ephemerality, and their power to transform, are thus a key way in which cultures acknowledge, negotiate and embody their propensity for living and dying every moment. Conjectures about what performance is, often spill over into speculations about what performance is for and, therefore, how performances should be carried out. Ontological issues appear to have ethical and political corollaries when considering performance. If cultures continually live and die, along with their embodiments in performances, so artists who are mindful of this transience will work accordingly, knowing that their work is as strong as the moment it is created, and as fleeting as the moment it passes. Perhaps those who create social events do likewise, mindful that societies, while appearing relatively stable and lasting, are also ephemeral and transient. If it is the case that performance(s) bring culture(s) into being, maybe this is also true for society/ies. Perhaps what makes society possible is that performances, and performance, bring societies, and therefore society, into being.
Peter Murphy, ‘Writing About What Cannot Be Written About’
‘Writing’ is often taken as a model of the creative process. It is widely assumed, not least by writers themselves, that creation in general has features that we readily associate with language, logic or discourse. ‘Text’, ‘textuality’, and ‘inter-textuality’ became very popular metaphors in the second half of the twentieth century to explain a large variety of cultural and artistic phenomenon. This echoed the influence of linguistic philosophy and linguistic models in twentieth-century cultural theory. The paper takes issue with the idea that the creative component of culture is structured on the model of language. It suggests rather that acts of imagination in fact look more like object creation and design, than speaking and writing. Ironically, this is true of speaking and writing as much as it is of painting or sculpture. The presentation explores the idea of the imagination as a form or process of object creation, and that imaginative writing, whether in the arts or the sciences, is closer in nature to an act of sculpture or work of design than it is to a speech act or a discursive text.
December
Conference on Religious Communication
The conference will be held just prior to the World Parliament of Religions. It will seek explore all aspects of religious communication including religious media (both its use of mass media and ‘face to face’ communication such as prayer, sermons, and confession), the portrayal of religion in the media, and ceremony and religious aesthetics. The conference will serve to consolidate research collaborations between Monash University academics in the area of religious communication, as well as serve to further research links with other institutions.
More information and registration on the conference home page.
Visit of Professor Agnes Heller for a public seminar on aesthetics and society
Agnes Heller is the author of over 40 books, including most recently Immortal Comedy: The Comic Phenomenon in Art, Literature, and Life (2005), The Time is Out of Joint: Shakespeare as Philosopher of History (2002), A Theory of Modernity (1999), The Concept of the Beautiful (1999), A Theory of Modernity (1999), An Ethics of Personality (1996) and A Philosophy of History in Fragments (1993).
Aesthetics: An International Colloquium on Art, Aesthetics and Imagination
| 2010 | TBA |
Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad KingResearch Seminar to run parallel with prospective theatrical performance of Peter Maxwell Davies’ Eight Songs for a Mad King. This is based around a performance research investigation into the scenographic, dramaturgical, compositional and performative elements of a contemporary production of Eight Songs of a Mad King — music by Peter Maxwell Davies, libretto by Randolph Stow. One of the features of the production is the computer-generated modification of the live voice, enabling chords to be ‘sung’, an aspect of the musical score unable to be realized in the 1968 when the work was first produced. The first iteration of the research performance (in 2008) included: Michael Coe (DTS) as performer and scenographer; Peter Snow (DTS) as performer and dramaturg; Thomas Reiner (Music) as musical director; Peter McIlwain (Music) as sonic composer. This production was directed by professional director Christopher Snow. An orchestra of professional musicians was conducted by Benjamin Northey, who has recently worked with the ACO and Richard Tognetti. The planned Research Seminar will discuss Maxwell Davies’ work, 20th century art music, innovations in art music theatre, and British 20th-century composition.
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Place, Art and AestheticsOne day Conference. Research event planned on the role of place, home, and landscape in the artistic imagination
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Research Seminar on _Pygmalion: Sculpture, Silence, ArtA seminar based loosely on the myth of Pygmalion and its significance for the creative arts and the humanities. The myth will be explored against the background of the visual arts, philosophy, theatre, film, performance, classics, and anthropology. The seminar will explore the role of sculptural form and silent expression in human imagination and creative action.
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| May |
Manoly Lascaris and Patrick WhiteOne day Conference with Associate Professor Vrasidias Karalis (University of Sydney)
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| July |
Freedom of Artistic Expression: Blasphemy and Traditional Cultural ExpressionThe conference will together lawyers and researchers (from humanities, social sciences, and the arts) interested in the protection of sacred symbols and free speech issues. At the moment there is an intellectual divide between international protocols on that protect indigenous religious symbols, and those arguing for complete freedom of expression (and the abolition of blasphemy law). The conference will discuss issues in an attempt to encourage them to address each others’ positions, and to find the significant issues over which they can agree.
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| 2011 | February |
The Cultural ConservativesA conference on the aesthetics and politics of contemporary cultural conservatives.
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June or July |
Buenos Aires-Melbourne Symposium: Creative Cities of the SouthThe purpose of the symposium is to bring together Argentine and Australian researchers who work on the question of the cultural economies of cities and, in particular, the role of creativity in the metropolitan context. While much of the discussion of creative cities is focused on the cultural dynamics of North American and European metropolises, the time is arguably ripe for considering how creativity functions in the great metropolises of the South. The symposium could therefore enrich the debate about creative cities and urban cultural economies more generally through a consideration of the specificities and similarities of Buenos Aires and Melbourne as cultural and creative ‘hubs’.
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| October |
Conference on PMPR: Politics, Media, Performance and RhetoricA two-day conference exploring the role of rhetoric and gesture, actors and audiences in politics—and the use of the media as a contemporary stage for politics.
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