Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 5, Issue 2-3, 2016

Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s The Lego Movie (2014) was touted by some popular critics as a kind of celebration of collective emancipation in the face of corporate domination. Obviously, such a reading, given the corporate framing of Lego and the commercial film in general as product, is immensely problematic. However, what is particularly provocative about Lord and Miller’s film is not that it addresses the viewer as infantile, hapless consumer-dupe, as has traditionally been the case in advertising models, but that it does, in fact, the very opposite: it invites the ‘hip’ viewer to laugh along with its lampooning of its own ontological status as commercial brand-film. This is ideology in its most seductive, persuasive form. This tendency – overtly challenging one’s own ideological frame whilst at the same time essentially supporting it – ‘second order ideology’ – is not particularly new, but has become increasingly widespread throughout contemporary popular culture in recent years.

This article draws on four true stories of long distance relationships to discuss how the tangible evidence of long distance love has changed over the past 130 years. The medium for expressing love has passed from hand-written letters and carte de viste portraits to the digital era, which has had a profound effect on the nature and style of communication. The way these respective couples ‘beat the distance’ and the significance of the different modes of contact is examined. Today, romantic communications take on added significance if they are needed as proof of a committed relationship for partner visa applications. After World War II, travelling for love became an international phenomenon, when an estimated 15,000 Australian war brides crossed the seas to join the men they had met during the war. The ideal of romantic love and the feminist response to it is briefly examined. While the material culture of long distance love has evolved to be more immediate, it is not necessarily more intimate nor satisfying.

Since the late 1990s, television light entertainment schedules have increasingly featured programming that focuses on home renovation, a do-it-yourself principle and associated ‘lifestyle choices’. Such programming typically rates highly with audiences and is very attractive to networks and producers (if only because its formulaic nature ensures production costs are relatively low). Here, one common characteristic is the central focus on the ‘deserving’ nature of the protagonists. Notably, this moral dimension both drives the narrative (how will the contestants fare in the set tasks?) and underpins the jeopardy (will the outcome be consonant with their level of ‘worth’?). Crucially, home makeover formats also offer sponsors unparalleled opportunities to integrate their products into the content of the programme. This article will outline the marketing and televisual underpinnings of such programming, with a particular focus on ‘moral jeopardy’. This term is defined as the tension ensuing from the moral positioning of contestants within reality programming. Using Season Two of The Block New Zealand (2012) as a case study, it will demonstrate how that tension may be uneasily or incompletely resolved, especially when the outcome for particular contestants is asynchronous with the expectation established within the narrative of the show.

At The Lock-Up in Newcastle one weekend in September 2015, a group of artists, musicians and performers, performed to an audience which included philosopher commentators. The idea was to look for points of intersection, interface or divergence between art and philosophy. However, what we found was that the commentators were not engaged in analysing what was simply given them, but instead actively constructing the meaning they would ascribe to the work. As such they were co-creators. The objective of this report of the event is to establish a basis for more collaboration between art and philosophy in the future on the assumption that interdisciplinarity reveals possibilities and perspectives masked by the general insularity of well-established disciplines.

Clothes have a significant presence in literature, in terms of both the construction and the reconstruction of a historical moment and its literary representations. Of particular interest in this article is the role of clothes and sartorial fashion in the aesthetics of such historical moments, and how the literary representation of dress contributes to the production of distinctive national aesthetics in the antipodes – New Zealand and Australia. In particular, this article considers the use of light and dark in the dress represented in two contrasting texts, in order to explore the ways in which fashion functions in the writing of melancholia. The aesthetics of melancholia are determined by both light and dark, not simply by darkness. It is the contrast between the two that produces the sense of unease and loss that engenders the melancholy aesthetic. In considering the use of light and dark in the sartorial aesthetics of two antipodean literary texts it is possible to reflect upon the particularities of sartorial aesthetic modes in order to open up questions concerning the role of literary fashion in the construction of national aesthetic identity.

Straddling the boundaries between art and fashion, a group of young avant guard Australian fashion designers burst onto the scene in the 1970s – 1980s with a blur and blaze of spectacular colours, reflecting the spirit and vibrancy of Australia. Their dazzling brightly coloured one-of-a-kind art clothes captured Australia’s exuberance, its vitality and its pioneering spirit; a larrikin kind of quality that is so often inherent in the Australian character. The notion of fashion as art can be attributed to this group of visionaries who explored the broader aesthetics and expressive qualities associated with the visual arts and created a new language of fashion. Rather than following fashion trends, they consciously rejected mainstream norms, and created distinctive Australian art clothes and raised craft to the status of the fine arts. The paper examines the creative work of Australian designers Jenny Kee, Linda Jackson, Katie Pye and Jenny Bannister who created a unique vision of Australian dress that become part of Australian fashion history.

As a technology of gender, the music video genre has consistently acted to represent women as sexually available. Patriarchal discourses have been inscribed onto the bodies of women, in an industry predominantly controlled by white, male record executives. Gendered representations are constructed by the music video technology, but are also absorbed by viewers. British singer, songwriter and dancer FKA twigs’ self-directed music videos challenge the sexualization of women. The artist offers viewers an intense bodily experience of femininity, devoid of Mulvey’s ‘male gaze’. This article argues the complex representation of the artist’s body using corporeal feminist theory and posthuman notions of the cyborg. FKA twigs’ representations of female sexuality and the cyborg are considered in three music videos. The article explores the texts as a Thirdspace, resisting and encompassing dichotomized discourses such as masculine–feminine, inside–outside, intellect–emotion, organic– artificial. The strong, permeable, cyborg body of FKA twigs occupies a Thirdspace of corporeal subjectivity resisting patriarchal discourses that suggest the female body exists to be looked at.

The now famous Belle d’Opium Eau de parfum campaign of Yves Saint Laurent Beauty featuring a naked Sophie Dahl has provoked both derision and titillation in audiences since its release in 2000. On the one hand, the image is clearly sexually alluring. On the other, the subject’s nakedness also provokes male fear of the female body as a site of difference, that is, castration, and demonstrates a re-claiming of female eroticism from the traditional domain of male sexual desires – a ‘grotesque’ display of female self-pleasure in defiance of the male gaze. For this reason, the advert captures particularly well the paradox of woman as both an object of attraction and a site for culturally informed moral reprehension through this mode of defiance. This article examines how the advert works on multiple registers, not only drawing attention to deep social and cultural anxieties that exist in relation to the female body but importantly also demonstrating an active reclaiming of women’s libidinal pleasure and ‘grotesque’ bodily ‘difference’. In this sense, the article argues that the Opium advert can be interpreted as a site of active transgression of strict moral and normative gender expectations, along the lines of Mary Russo’s concept of the ‘female grotesque’. In analysing this particular quality of the advert, the article goes on to suggest that the image works particularly well to challenge patriarchal conceptions of women, and yet the subject’s clear sexual attraction also defies traditional feminist interpretations of female objectification. It is precisely because of the moral ambiguity attached to the advert that it acts as a valuable site of discussion on how female agency can be interpreted through conditions traditionally seen as ‘objectifying’.

MISE EN SCÈNE AND FILM STYLE, ADRIAN MARTIN (2014) London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, illus., paperback ISBN: 1349444170, 235 pp., £19

EPHEMERAL TRACES: BRISBANE’S ARTIST-RUN SCENE IN THE 1980s, UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND ART MUSEUM, BRISBANE, 2 APRIL 2016–26 JUNE 2016

MARGARITA ROBERTSON: 3.33.12, DUNEDIN PUBLIC ART GALLERY, DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND, 18 MARCH–17 APRIL 2016 Curated by Tim Pollock, Commercial Development Manager, Dunedin Public Art Gallery; Margarita Robertson, Creative Director, NOM*d

SKIN, SPACE, TRACE: REVIEW OF COLLETTE DINNIGAN: UNLACED, MUSEUM OF APPLIED ARTS AND SCIENCES, SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA, 5 SEPTEMBER 2015–28 AUGUST 2016

STRANGE AND FAMILIAR: BRITAIN AS REVEALED BY INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHERS, CURATED BY MARTIN PARR, BARBICAN CENTRE, LONDON, 16 MARCH 2016–19 JUNE 2016