Daphne Mayo Visiting Fellowship
Daphne Mayo (1895-1982) was for much of her life Queensland’s best known artist and passionate advocate for the arts.
Her work includes the Tympanum on the Brisbane City Hall and the Women’s War Memorial in Anzac Square. She was a trustee of the Queensland Art Gallery 1960–1967, established an art reference library now at The University of Queensland, and left her private papers to UQ’s Fryer Library.
To honour her profound contribution to the arts, UQ's School of Communication and Arts has established the Daphne Mayo Visiting Fellowship in Visual Culture.The Visiting Fellowship is now a catalyst for dialogue and debate not only about art but also about art museums and galleries and art collecting and appreciation in the State.
Each year, a major world figure will visit Brisbane to speak about the latest trends, influences, and theories in their area of visual culture.
You can view past Daphne Mayo Fellows and their talks below.
2024: Professor Julie Turnock, University of Illinois
From Star Wars to Marvel to the Oscars: Blockbuster Aesthetics and Special/Visual Effects
How is it that when watching recent blockbuster films, we can generally state with confidence that the effects were 'good', or 'not good'? How do recent special effects-driven films, such as the Star Wars or Marvel films suggest realism, and how does this concept of realism extend to non-fantasy, 'awards-bait' films such as Past Lives (2023) or Power of the Dog (2022)? A common notion of realism in special/visual effects involves an appeal to the sense that 'it just looks right', but this notion has been surprisingly unexamined. I argue that realism should not be understood as perceptual realism, an aesthetic that attempts to replicate what the eye sees 'in real life', but instead derives from a very specific historical context. This presentation will explore the development of this prevalent but underexamined realist aesthetic, developed at the industry-leading effects company Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) and show how ILM veritably invented our contemporary notion of photorealism, not only in special effects, but in the cinema and moving image capture realms more broadly.
Julie Turnock is Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, in the College of Media, and was awarded an NEH fellowship in 2024.
She is the author of Plastic Reality: Special Effects, Technology, and the Emergence of 1970s Blockbuster Aesthetics, from Columbia University Press, and The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light and Magic and the Rendering of Realism from University of Texas Press. She has published on special effects, spectacle, and technology of the silent and studio era, the 1970s, and recent digital cinema in Cinema Journal, Film History, Film Criticism, and New Review of Film and Television Studies, as well as several edited collections.
2023: Professor Andrés Mario Zervigón, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Visible Yet Transparent: The Lens in Nineteenth-Century Photographic Cultures
In 1890, the famous Jena Glass Works of Carl Zeiss released the Anastigmat photographic lens to great fanfare. The nearly faultless mimesis it generated seemed to conclude a chapter in optical technology that had progressed in a predetermined manner since photography’s origins. But why exactly had Zeiss developed its expensive mechanism and what drove photographers to buy it? This talk proposes that the consistent focus and varied depth of field that the Anastigmat provided were not in and of themselves the desired goals of the new “corrected lens,” but that they were instead visible signals of a pictorial model that makers and consumers had been seeking since the public introduction of photography in 1839. The goal was a transparent realism that remained stubbornly external to the medium, an illusionistic standard that had largely been mediated by painting since the renaissance and was now apparently possible in photography as well. But this history of pictorial perfection and the Anagstimat was not inevitable. Other lenses developed around the same time answered to dramatically different technological and aesthetic imperatives. They tell an alternative story of photography’s identity that is untethered to mimetic fidelity, photographic transparency, and what we now call indexicality.
Presenter
Andrés Mario Zervigón is Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.
His scholarship concentrates on the interaction between photographs, film, and fine art, generally focusing on moments in history when these media prove inadequate to their presumed task of representing the visual. Zervigón is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion, and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage (University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Photography and Germany (Reaktion Books, 2017). With Tanya Sheehan he edited Photography and Its Origins (Routledge, 2014), with Sabine Kriebel Photography and Doubt (Routledge 2017), and with Donna Gustafson Subjective-Objective: A Century of Social Photography (Zimmerli Musuem/Hirmer Verlag, 2017). With Antonella Pelizzari he is currently co-editing an anthology on histories of photography in general-interest illustrated magazines titled Print Matters (Getty Publications, 2024). Zervigón’s current monographic project is Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung--The Worker's Illustrated Magazine, 1921-1938: A History of Germany's Other Avant-Garde, for which he received a CASVA Senior Fellowship (2013-14). At Rutgers Zervigón leads The Developing Room, an academic working group that promotes interdisciplinary dialogue on photography’s history, theory, and practice.
2022: Professor Rex Butler, Monash University
In a very intelligent act of curation, the final wall of the 2020 Queensland Art Gallery exhibition Unfinished Business: The Art of Gordon Bennett ended with a blown-up and slightly abbreviated version of a notebook entry Bennett had originally made on 25 August 1990. Down the wall ran the statements “I am Gordon Bennett”, “I am Australian”, “I am Aboriginal”, “I am Human Being” and “I am Spirit”, all crossed out with a line through them, followed by a final “I am” uncrossed out and the artist’s initials again crossed out and the date of the original notebook entry.
In a sense, of course, the wall operated as the artist’s signature authenticating the show we had just seen before we left it, but how is it also an explanation of Bennett’s artistic practice altogether? Does that final “I am” stand outside of the failure of those previous attempted statements of identity or is it inseparable from it? Is Bennett suggesting that the subject is always this crossing-out or correction, indeed, this self-crossing out and -correction? Are we not all made up of opposites that we must attempt to reconcile, like “Aboriginal” and “Australian” and “Human Being” and “Spirit”? Are we not all divided in that way Bennett points out? And is it not perhaps in this self-division that we are all ultimately the same?
Rex Butler
Presenter
Rex Butler is a renowned art historian, writer and Professor (Art History & Theory).
His research interests include Australian art and art criticism, Post-War American art and Critical Theory. He has recently completed a book, UnAustralian Art, with ADS Donaldson, to be published by Power Publishing, University of Sydney, and another, Stanley Cavell and the Arts, for Bloomsbury Publishing, London. He is currently editing two collections, one on the Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo and another on the documentary film-maker Joshua Oppenheimer.
He is the author or editor of eleven books, including What is Appropriation?(1996), Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (1999), A Secret History of Australian Art (2002), Slavoj Zizek: Live Theory (2005), Radical Revisionism (2005), Borges' Short Stories: A Reader's Guide (2010) and Deleuze and Guattari's What is Philosophy?: A Reader's Guide (2015).
2020: Professor Murray Stuart Smith, University of Kent
Remain in Light: Philosophical Naturalism, Aesthetic Value and, Cultural Crosstalk
Aesthetic experience – the kind of experience afforded paradigmatically by artworks – is central rather than peripheral to human existence. But aesthetic experience and the value it underpins is complex, both in its relations with other kinds of value (epistemic, moral, political, cultural), and in the diverse ways and contexts in which it can be created or apprehended.
In this lecture, Professor Murray Smith will explore these issues through the case of Remain in Light, the landmark 1980 album by Talking Heads and Brian Eno, encompassing the visual and performative dimensions of the band’s aesthetic (in Stop Making Sense and True Stories, in their music videos, cover designs, and live performance style) as well as the music itself. Remain in Light takes on particular interest as an example of cultural and aesthetic ‘crosstalk,’ between the milieu of New York new wave art rock and the AfroBeat of Nigerian bandlander Fela Kuti, which exerted a powerful influence on Talking Heads during the making of the album.
Drawing on the tools of philosophical naturalism, Murray will outline a framework for understanding the nature of such intercultural interaction, which recognises the specificity of cultural traditions, the dynamics of exchange between them, and the ethical and aesthetic questions such exchanges necessarily prompt.
About the Presenter
Murray Smith is a leading film theorist who has an international reputation for his pioneering work on cognition, emotion, and character engagement in the cinema. More recently, Smith has developed a research profile in philosophy of film and philosophy of art more broadly, and a major outcome of this research strand has recently been published as Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Oxford University Press, 2017; paperback 2020).
Smith is a Past President (2014-17) of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image, and a former Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University (2017-18).
2018: Professor Keith Moxey, Columbia University
What Time Is It in the History of Art
This lecture criticizes the chronological system that has for so long dominated art history’s professional activities. Its orderly progression of periods from ancient, medieval, renaissance, to modern and contemporary, betrays a Eurocentric parochialism and fails to recognize that the world’s cultures do not organize their times according to a teleological chronology. Subscribing to a heterochonic view of time, the author argues that not only objects, works of art, but also subjects, the humans who create and treasure them, are constituted by many different forms of time. Works of art do not just belong to the historical horizon to which chronology would assign them but provoke aesthetic responses in a variety of different historical moments. This power to escape time is anachronic--it cannot be measured chronologically. The anachronic event that takes place when human subjects encounter these privileged objects is an aesthetic moment that cannot be predicted or defined. The argument is illustrated with objects from several different cultures that subscribe to distinct temporal systems that cannot be reduced to that adopted by Europe during the era of colonization. Keywords: Eurocentrism, Heterochrony, Anachrony, Chronology, Temporality.
About the Presenter
Professor Keith Moxey is Barbara Novak Professor of Art History at Barnard College. He is the author of books on the historiography and philosophy of art history, as well as on sixteenth century painting and prints in Northern Europe. His publications include: Visual Time: The Image in History (2013); The Practice of Persuasion: Paradox and Power in Art History (2001); The Practice of Theory: Poststructuralism, Cultural Politics, and Art History (1994); Peasants, Warriors, and Wives: Popular Imagery in the Reformation (1989). He is also the co-editor of several anthologies: Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Culture (2002); The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspective (1998); Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (1994); and Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (1991).
Historic List of Daphne Mayo Visiting Fellows
- 2024: Professor Julie Turnock, University of Illinois
- 2023: Professor Andrés Mario Zervigón, State University of New Jersey.
- 2022: Professor Rex Butler, Monash University
- 2021: Not awarded in 2021
- 2020: Professor Murray Stuart Smith, University of Kent
- 2019: Not awarded in 2019
- 2018: Professor Keith Moxey, Columbia University
- 2017: Professor Angela Ndalianis, Melbourne University
- 2016: Professor Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, University of Birmingham
- 2015: Not awarded in 2015
- 2014: Emeritus Professor Thomas Elsaesser, University of Amsterdam
- 2013: Professor Timothy Ingold, University of Aberdeen
- 2012: Professor Deborah Howard, University of Cambridge
- 2011: Professor Anne Marsh, Monash University
- 2010: Professor William Rothman, University of Miami
- 2009: Professor Ian McLean, University of Western Australia
- 2008: Professor Terry Smith, University of Pittsburgh
- 2007: Associate Professor James Meyer, Emory University, Atlanta
- 2006: Professor Roger Benjamin, University of Sydney
- 2005: Professor Leonard Bell, University of Auckland
- 2004: Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena
- 2003: David Jaffe, National Gallery, London