2009 AAANZ Conference Abstracts - The Art Association of Australia ...

the decorative label often levelled at contemporary Japanese
prints and take it into an altogether more interesting and
challenging realm. Shimada appropriates historical photographs
of Asian “comfort women” in W.W.II, and driven by her feminist
platform, transforms these documents into art works that reveal
the hidden histories of women under Tennoism (the Emperor
system). Conversely Noda, an older artist, steeped in 1960s
conceptual art and Zen, takes snaps of the familiar and creates
photo-etchings under the term Diary that are contemporary
visual equivalents to haiku. Using these two cases, an argument
is made for the need to adopt new criteria for evaluating prints –
one that incorporates non-Euramerican traditions.
Anne Kirker is an independent art consultant, curator and
writer. She held senior curatorial positions at the Queensland Art
Gallery, Brisbane from 1988 to 2006 following work at major art
museums in New Zealand. She was closely involved in the first
four Asia-Pacific Triennials of Contemporary Art, from which her
doctorate arose.
6. Lace Dress of Liberty: (Re)appraising Decorative
Femininity through Kamikaze Girls
Masafumi Monden
Derived from Nabokov’s controversial novel (1955), the name
Lolita connotes infamy, particularly when applied to the way
in which young women are represented in Western culture.
Evidently, the Lolita look, where young women are portrayed
girlishly and “innocently” in Western media, is accused by some
as endorsing female infantilisation and objectification (Merskin,
2004). This sentiment reflects the famous contention made
by sociologist Thorstein Veblen at the turn of last century, in
which female sartorial ornamentation was a stable signifier of
dependency and subservience. To what extent a “girlish” and
emphatically “ornamental” fashion-look inevitably signifies
such negative connotations is the question posed in this paper.
Looking for a new possibility, I turn to Japanese culture where
different modes of representation of femininity are flourishing
than in the West (Napier, 1998).
My paper focuses on Tetsuya Nakashima’s film adaptation of
Kamikaze Girls (2004). The emphasis of this film is particularly
highlighted by Momoko, one of the film’s two adolescent,
“fashionista” heroines. She is dressed in the Japanese Lolita
fashion, a lavishly lacy and self-consciously girlish style
with references to the European Rococo tradition, and quite
freely engages in established “masculine” activities without
undergoing any sartorial metamorphosis. In this paper, I will
argue that Kamikaze Girls offers an innovative representation
of young women with a high degree of autonomy and agency.
Furthermore, I explore how the film possibly gainsays the
established notion that assumes the correlation between
girlish femininity and negative connotations of passivity and
subservience. Kamikaze Girls, I argue, might shed positive light
upon our understanding of the disparaged ornamental and
“girlish” sartorial style.
Masafumi Monden graduated from the University of Western
Sydney in 2005 with Master of Arts degree in Communication,
Media & Culture with distinction. He is currently a PhD candidate
at the University of Technology, Sydney where he is working on
representations of fashion in contemporary Japanese fictional
narratives.
8. Sketching Biography
Susan Steggall
Biography has not always enjoyed academic attention and until
late in the twentieth century it was traditionally consigned to
history. Yet this has been an uneasy liaison and biography is
now considered a hybrid form, between history and literature.
An art historian is also something of a hybrid – not only a scholar
who must use words technically to contextualize often difficult
or obscure works of art within time, place and culture, but also
a writer who must use language creatively to describe, interpret
and communicate the essence of such objects to the viewer and
the reader. If biographers of scientists and scholars describe
their work as intellectual biography, those of writers, poets and
playwrights as literary biography, those of artists as ‘aesthetic’
or ‘artistic’, then a biography of an art historian must encompass
elements of all of these.
My paper looks at some of the issues at stake when creating a
portrait, in words, of an art historian – in this instance Joan Kerr
who, in addition be being a respected academic, was something
of a larrikin public intellectual.
Susan Steggall is an art historian with a strong interest in
biography. She recently submitted, as a PhD in Creative
Writing at the University of NSW, a biography of the late
Joan Kerr. Publishing credits include Alpine Beach: a family
autobiography.
9. Contemporary Artists Responding to a History
Vivonne Thwaites
I am a curator of contemporary art projects that make
connections with history to examine the central issues that
face our society. Fundamental to my practice is to set up
structures in which contemporary artists can respond to
histories, by producing new works. In addition, my projects
are interdisciplinary in that they provide the opportunity for my
engagement with authorities from other disciplines. An important
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