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- Volume 7, Issue 1, 2018
Australasian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 7, Issue 1, 2018
Volume 7, Issue 1, 2018
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Australian rock ’n’ roll gear: From the pubs to museum collections
More LessAbstractIn post-Second World War Australia rock n roll music became a significant expression of youth culture, art, rebellion, entertainment and also an area of employment. The technology that enabled the music – particularly the instruments and amplification – required capital investment to obtain it and expertise to maintain it. The leaders of this product market were in the United States and the United Kingdom, and use of this technology required adaptation and substantial capital outlay. Because of voltage compliance issues, scarcity of overseas products and to defray costs, Australian manufacturers and technical experts used the templates created by overseas makers and developed their own products. Two important examples of these are part of the collection of the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences: the Wasp amplifier cabinet (used by Deniz Tek of Radio Birdman) and the Maton guitar (used by Harry Vanda of The Easybeats). The Wasp amplifier – along with several other Australian-made amplifiers – developed and survived only in the local rock n roll industry, and were early casualties of globalization. Maton guitars survived and are a significant maker of guitars internationally. The stories of these objects – specifically and more broadly – are examples of artistic and technical, yet also unplanned invention. They are also an important, though not often celebrated, part of why Australian rock music in the 1970s and 1980s was a cultural phenomenon. This article will examine through primary sources and scholarly texts why one product disappeared from the market, while another survived; and where these objects sit in a popular culture museum collection.
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Looking in on a special collection: Science fiction fanzines at Murdoch University Library
By Jessie LymnAbstractThe material remains of subcultural communities – in this case, fanzines – often present challenges in definition, classification and materiality, and this makes them valuable primary texts and source material for new knowledges and teaching. In this article, I present an argument for the sustained collection of science fiction fanzines within a university Special Collection, drawing on examples from the Murdoch University Library’s significant twentieth-century science fiction fanzine collection. Highlights include consideration of the records of everyday life that feature in the fanzines and the networked communities science fiction fanzines created through postal systems and other exchanges. The article argues that it is the form, content and networks of fanzines – what I call their ‘practices’ – that make them a unique site of research and of national historical significance, and an important part of a university’s special collection.
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Collecting the criminal: Murder and mayhem in cultural institutions
More LessAbstractCultural institutions, across Australia, collect works of crime fiction and true crime that tell narratives about a range of unlawful activities. These institutions also collect legal texts, papers and records as well as numerous pieces of realia and of art that record and unpack some of the most horrific incidents in our national history. Crime has long held a prominent position in the popular imagination; a position supported by galleries, libraries, archives and museums. From small, incidental collections that form only one element of a wide-ranging repository to large, significant collections that focus on the criminal in deed and in impact. This article explores how these collections assist in informing shared attitudes towards crime through presenting stories of an extraordinary array of wrongdoers: from largely forgotten convicts, to well-known bushrangers, to notorious murderers, to those who committed many different types of crimes. In the Australian context, which features a widely acknowledged tradition of sympathizing with the criminal, some malefactors have disturbed our ideas of right and wrong. Moreover, crime-focused collections can serve to elevate our fear of crime and influence how we feel about different forms of punishment. In this way, cultural institutions demonstrate they play an important role in a field often considered to be the exclusive domain of law makers and law enforcers.
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Hybrid spaces: Melbourne Museum’s Jurassic World: The Exhibition
Authors: Jessica Balanzategui and Angela NdalianisAbstractIn 2016, The Melbourne Museum staged the world premiere of Jurassic World: The Exhibition, a globally touring exhibition inspired by Universal Pictures’ blockbuster film, Jurassic World (2015), featuring animatronic dinosaurs created by Melbourne’s Creature Technology. The exhibition had the most successful opening month of any exhibition at the Museum to date, selling over 100,000 tickets. Yet Jurassic World also met with controversy for its theme park-esque design and pervasive branding, prioritization of spectacle and attraction over cultural heritage and education, and seamless integration of fact and fiction. In this article, we carry out a close analysis of Jurassic World’s combination of theme park and museum exhibition practices, situating the exhibition as a particularly significant example of the developing trend towards the creation of immersive ‘narrative environments’ in twenty-first century museums, as museums increasingly draw upon the devices of popular entertainment to engage and attract guests. Drawing from Norman Klein’s model of the ‘scripted space’ and Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s ‘experience economy’, which has its roots in Disney theme parks, our analysis shows how Jurassic World plays with the boundaries of fact and fiction in a way that self-reflexively interrogates the contemporary relationship between popular entertainment and museums.
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The curation of ancient Egypt in the twenty-first century: How should the present engage with the past?
More LessAbstractThis article examines how museums and archaeologists present ancient Egypt to the public. For archaeology, the role of the museum is extremely significant as it is the most popular forum through which non-specialists interact with the discipline. But how often do archaeologists and Egyptologists consider the manner in which the public consumes antiquity? There is a persistent and continuing tension to develop a balance between the popular and accurate notions of ancient Egypt. Museums are a voice of authority and legitimacy; when ancient Egypt is exhibited and interpreted it must satisfy the curious fascination, while also allowing for the development of archaeological literacy. The former ensures people will visit the exhibition while the latter allows them to understand the content on a contextual and cultural level. Archaeologists must care how their discipline is perceived so that the audience can comprehend the fruits of the labour beyond that which is popularly ‘known’. The contemporary and future role of museology and Egyptian antiquities will also be discussed concerning the risk heritage places face in a world beset by conflict.
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Collaborating and co-curating knowledge: Participatory engagement on Twitter between galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) and education audiences
More LessAbstractGalleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) are now actively concentrating on enriching communication across a variety of audiences in varied ways. This focus on communication, and thus engagement, has been significantly influenced by the rise of the Internet, social media and mobile technologies. As new kinds of experiences are tailored, there is a drawing together of networks to produce and explore knowledge, co-curation of experiences and scaffold participatory experiences to engage with objects, spaces and meaning making. This is where social media can provide a flexible and personalized experience that encourages interaction and discussion between visitors, museums and objects underpinned by reciprocity, community, and a shift in the cultural organization as the only expert. The monthly Tweet Chat called #MuseumEdOz is discussed in this article as a way to demonstrate how GLAM organizations, GLAM educators, curators and teachers can engage with institutions, key issues, innovation and objects through the platform Twitter. A discussion critically framing the notion of digital interaction through Tim Ingold’s (2015) lines, intersections and meshworks is presented. The data are explored through the entanglement of lines by digital becoming, visibility and connecting, and reciprocity. Illuminated is the emergent participatory culture, new partnerships, collaborative problem solving and the development of a more empowered sense of citizenship.
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Encountering people and place: Museums through the lens of Instagram
By Kylie BudgeAbstractThe world of galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM), once a set of onsite only experiences, is being increasingly encountered in the digital realm with screen culture and mobile devices now mainstream in many parts of the globe. The social media platform, Instagram, with its strong visual presence, is a popular window used by museum visitors to discover collections held by cultural institutions, and to reflect this experience back to their shared networks. This activity constitutes a form of sense-making. A neglected area of research to date, the digital content produced by visitors to cultural institutions provides unique insights into popular aspects of exhibitions and collections, particular spaces within their buildings, and the ways in which visitors experience and engage with these. This article draws on research into visitors’ use of Instagram in museums to argue that encountering material culture occurs in an integrated manner involving real-life and virtual experiences that act to create a social sense of the museum that is participatory and alluring. Place-making and social presence theories are used to interpret data generated by visitors. Findings highlight implications for museum practice and the changing role and value of social media in the everyday work of cultural institutions.
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Dried fruits pack a punch: Using gallery, library, archive and museum (GLAM) collections to tell history
More LessAbstractThis article will draw on the material culture collections of GLAM institutions to relate the under-researched and entwined histories of the Australian dried fruits industry and the post-First World War soldier settlement scheme. Using cookbooks, marketing posters, sheet music, newspapers, photographs and government reports, this article will show how popular culture was harnessed to support struggling returned soldiers. In so doing, Australian dried fruits became a symbol for nationalism, patriotism, nutrition and household economy. In the early 1920s, Australians were consuming less than a quarter of the 65,000 tonnes of dried fruit produced each year, much of which was grown and harvested by returned soldiers. Many soldier settlers were struggling to farm their grants of land successfully. Those that could reap a harvest were dismayed to find no market for it. Responding to this situation, the Victorian Dried Fruits Board commissioned Miss Flora Pell to write A Sunshine Cookery Book, which contained 50 recipes (all using dried fruits) ‘for the modern table’. The foreword to this free cookbook was patriotic and moralistic. ‘Housewives’ were urged to support returned soldiers by buying Australian currants, sultanas and raisins and cooking with them every day. As well as showing their patriotism by supporting returned soldiers, they were also encouraged to do their duty by their families, and feed them dried fruits, which were nutritious and economical. Food choices were political, even in the 1920s.
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Dispatches from the front line: A curator’s view of history exhibitions in Australia
By Guy HansenAbstractEvery year millions of Australians visit history exhibitions across the country. While museums are clearly one the most popular places for Australians to encounter their past, there is surprisingly little critical understanding of how history exhibitions are produced. While there is a growing literature in the academy about museums, there is little material written by practising history curators. When reviewing the Australian literature, the impression emerges that history curators are still working to define what it is they do and how they do it. The definition of curatorship varies considerably across the country. Debate occurs within institutions as to the remit of the curator, and professional demarcations fluctuate from museum to museum. The role of the curator as the driving force in the development of collections and exhibition content is constantly under challenge. In this environment of shifting professional boundaries an understanding of what history curators do is often left implicit rather than explicit. This lack of clarity stands in contrast to other curatorial streams in museums and galleries. Visual arts and natural history curators, for example, possess long-standing critical traditions that underpin their practice. History curators, however, are yet to gain full acceptance within Australian museums as the intellectual architects of exhibition content. In this article, I explore the role of history curators in producing historical knowledge and the part they play in exploring Australian popular culture.
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A regional romance of the storming of the art museum: Cultural contradictions of The Lionel Lindsay Art Gallery and Library
More LessAbstractThis article examines cultural contradictions of a regional Australiana collection, namely The Lionel Lindsay Art Gallery and Library (Lindsay Collection). This collection was established in Toowoomba by W. R. F. Bolton (1905–73), opened by Prime Minister Robert Menzies in 1959 and rehoused at Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery in the mid-1990s. Sir Lionel Lindsay (1874–1961) was, among many other identities, an artist, critic and tastemaker who condemned ‘the mob invasion of Art’ and disseminated a catastrophist cultural politics. For Lindsay, the collection named in his honour was a microcosm of ‘old traditional Australia’, before the nation and the art museum were stormed by ‘mass’ culture. The vanguard of that storming was modernism, which he viewed as a manifestation of mass-cultural fashion and sensationalism. Lindsay himself, however, had been a sensationalist newspaper illustrator and fashionable commercial artist from the 1890s to the 1920s; examples of his work for mass cultural forms are held in the collection. Drawing on museological lemmas by Quiccheberg and Bataille, and on Frankfurt School theses, this article presents a critical overview of contradictory cultural drives and vectors integral to the Lindsay Collection’s formation in the 1950s. Cultural contradictions of the collection are analysed not as idiosyncrasies of Lindsay and Bolton’s collecting praxes, but as symptomatic of the condition of cultural heritage in commodity society.
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Souveniring paradise: Popular culture and creative identity at the Gold Coast
More LessAbstractThis article reflects on the intersections between popular culture and contemporary art through the prism of curatorial and artistic practice presented within one small museum institution – Gold Coast City Gallery in Queensland, Australia. The purpose is to share the importance of the kinds of understandings that artists brought to the contemporary culture of the city and the way in which the museum, through collections, programmes and placing this work in critical dialogue with the community, sought to value a reading of popular culture for what it revealed about the city’s history and to make a contribution towards the ongoing wrestling of its evolving identity.
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Reviews
Authors: Simon Dwyer, Rachel Franks, Enya Moore and Rachel FranksAbstractMarvel: Creating the Cinematic Universe, Queensland Art Gallery, Gallery of Modern Art (Brisbane) in Collaboration with Marvel Entertainment, 27 May–3 September 2017
Icons: Highlights from the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, from 15 October 2016
Wonder Woman, Directed by Patty Jenkins (2017) USA: DC Films and Warner Bros. Pictures, 141 mins.
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