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 LEISURE AND VISUAL CULTURE
July 8~10, 2003
Centre
for Cultural Research in Sport, Roehampton University of
Surrey
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Page "under
construction" ~ please bookmark and return soon for latest
additions
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Tony Bennett
is Professor of Sociology at The Open University. His interests are in
areas where the concerns of sociology, cultural studies and cultural
history intersect. In particular, his research has embraced the
history and theory of museums, and the role played by diverse
systems of representing and remembering the past in the construction
of particular ways of being and acting in time. He is the author
of numerous key texts, including The Birth of the Museum:
History, Theory and Politics (1995).
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Prof. Tony
Bennett
CULTURE, EXHIBITION
AND HABIT
I draw in
this presentation on a specific interpretation of the concept
of culture for the light it throws on the social dynamics of
perception associated with the development of western exhibition
forms. The logic of culture, William Ray argues, depends on its
ability to articulate a sense of sameness and difference. This
inscribes our identities in a tension between inherited and shared
customs and traditions on the one hand, and, on the other, the
restless striving for new and distinguishing forms of individuality.
Culture is thus a mechanism which takes issue with habit, initiating
a process of critique through which the individual extricates
him or herself from unthinking immersion in inherited traditions
in order to initiate a process of self-development that will
result in new codes of behaviour.
This logic of culture has played a significant
role in the organisation of western exhibition practices. For
the question of habit has always been, in one way or another,
at issue in the museum. This is most evident in the modern art
museum which has pitched itself against the numbing of attention
it attributes to habitual forms of perception associated with
popular visual entertainment ~ from the magic lantern and the
cinema through to television and the computer screen. In doing
so, it has functioned as an instrument for 'perpetual perceptual
revolution', striving to keep the senses in the state of chastened
attentiveness that the logic of culture requires to produce a
dynamic of self-formation that is sustained by a dynamics of
sensory life. In considering how far this perspective can be
applied to other museums, this paper will aim to identify the
different ways in which, through their visual practices, museums
have aimed to operate as 'people movers' within the social and
cultural dynamics of modernity.
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Charlotte Brunsdon
teaches in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the
University of Warwick. As a member of the Midlands Television
Research Group she has been involved in a research project on
'The 8-9 slot on British' television' which is reported in the
European Jo rnal of Cultural Studies 4.1 (200 1). She
has long standing interests in issues of taste and quality in
British popular culture and has recently been researching television
archiving of dressmaking, flower-arranging and gardening. Her
publications include Screen Tastes and The Feminist, the Housewife
and the Soap Opera. She is currently working on a book
about London in the cinema.
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Prof. Charlotte
Brunsdon
'HERE'S ONE
I MADE EARLIER: HOBBIES, SKILLS, AND LIFESTYLE ON BRITISH TELEVISION'
Since the
early 1990s there has been a significant expansion in 'lifestyle
programming' on British television, and these programmes are
often cited as a symptom of the deterioration of public service
broadcasting. Their fans, though, argue that they represent a
democratisation of taste and television. I have been searching
in television archives to see how hobbies and skills were broadcast
in earlier periods, and will discuss changes in presentation,
address and the types of skills that are taught. One of my key
questions is 'what do you learn when you watch hobby and lifestyle
programming9', and I will explore older and newer Programmes
to suggest some answers, as well as comparing British programming
with that of Martha Stewart in the USA. Stewart is currently
under investigation for insider trading, but her programmes,
web-site and magazine have defined, for the 1990s, the US interior.
just as Delia, Jamie, Laurence and Alan Titchmarsh have shown
the British how to live. The paper will be illustrated with television
clips and slides.
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| Maxine Doyle is choreographer
and artistic director of the dance company, First Person. She trained at Roehampton,
University of Surrey and Laban Centre, forming First Person in
1996. She has won awards for her work such as the Bonnie Bird
Choreography Award (1999) and the Year of the Artist Commission
(South East Arts, 2000). In 2002, she toured with her production,
It's Only a Game Show..., billed as "dance theatre
meets Big Brother", which involved residencies and theatre
workshops across the south east, working with young people and
encouraging new audiences for contemporary dance. Paul Woodward
lectures in Drama & Physical Theatre at St.Mary's University
College, Twickenham. After training at Lancaster University
under the auspices of Pete Brooks (ex-Impact) and Johnathon Holloway
(Red Shift), Paul formed and performed with Sculpture Theatre
Company then worked with Glory What Glory in the early 90's.
On entering the field of education Paul has acted as dramaturg
and director on a number of projects including a collaboration
with the National Theatre of Madrid and community theatre projects
with the Theatre of the Deaf based at Reading University where
he was also a part time lecturer. He gained an MA distinction
at Royal Holloway investigating the theatres of the Orient and
the development of Deaf Theatre in Britain. Paul joined First
Person dance theatre company in 2000, acting as dramaturg for
the re-working of Plastic Chill. He has since collaborated with
Maxine Doyle on a number of projects including the 2001 Choreodrome
season at the Place. In 2002 he worked on the companies latest
touring show based on reality TV called It's Only a Gameshow
as both dramaturg and writer. |
Maxine Doyle
and Paul Woodward
IT'S ONLY A GAME SHOW ~ EVOLVING INTELLIGENCES AND PERFORMANCE-MAKING
FOR REALITY CULTURES
Robert Lepage
talks of contemporary audiences as having an 'evolved intelligence'
which liberates the theatrical form to incorporate media literacy
within the performance paradigm. Likewise, Tim Etchells talks
of making performance for generations growing up with a TV playing
in the corner of each living room. It's Only a Gameshow takes
these reference points to create a performance that celebrates
this shared visual literacy.
The work explores the melting point between visual
communication systems in reality television and the dominance
of game shows in contemporary consciousness.
Taking the format of a game show itself, it scrutinizies
the intensity of behaviour which winning demands in a world where
the personal is public and everyone is a potential contestant.
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James Kneale
teaches in the Department of Geography at University College
London.
His research interests in cultural and historical geography concern
the spaces of popular culture and everyday life. The first of
two strands of his current research focuses on geographies of
drink (the moral geographies of drink and drunkenness, the material
landscapes of drinking places and the nature of drinking practices).
The second focuses on the representation of space and place in
science fiction books, and the ways in which reading produces
and transforms social spaces.
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James Kneale
DRUNKEN GEOGRAPHIES:
MASS-OBSERVATION's STUDIES OF 'A SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT PLUS ALCOHOL',
1937-48
Human geographers
have begun to question the orientation of the discipline's cultural
turn, suggesting that in concentrating on questions of representation
and visual culture we have neglected the social and material.
This paper engages with some of these debates through material
which should be familiar to those with an interest in leisure.
The social survey movement Mass-Observation
produced a wealth of material concerning drinking between 1937
and 1948. Noting that official measures of drunkenness were based
on a confusion of a word with a state of behaviour, Observers
in Bolton, Blackpool, London and elsewhere concluded that public
drunkenness was a social ~ rather than a strictly physiological
~ phenomenon.
Drawing on the anthropological
and sociological literatures on alcohol to interpret this material,
I will argue that drunkenness cannot be understood as a simple
consequence of alcohol consumption detached from the complex
interaction of human and non-human actors in particular social
spaces.
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Bran Nicol
is Senior Lecturer in English Literature in the School of Social,
Historical and Literary Studies at University of Portsmouth. His interests are in
cultural theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis and literature. He
has published books on Iris Murdoch and D.M. Thomas and is the
editor of Postmodernism and the Contemporary Novel (Edinburgh
University Press, 2002) and is author of the forthcoming Core
Cultural Theorists.. He has also published articles on psychoanalysis
and cultural theory in journals such as Modern Fiction Studies
and Paragraph. This presentation draws on his explorations of
the connection between postmodernism and psychopathology.
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Bran Nicol
LOOK WHO'S
STALKING!
CALLE, BAUDRILLARD, AUSTER AND THE ART OF COMPULSIVE PURSUIT
This paper
revolves around a curious ménage à trois of
cultural influence. French conceptual artist Sophie Calle follows
strangers and photographs them without their knowledge. Jean
Baudrillard follows Calle and sees in her an embodiment of his
notion of seduction. Calle's project 'seduces' novelist Paul
Auster so that she becomes the basis for one of his characters
in Leviathan. Calle is seduced herself by this refracted
self-portrait into assuming the identity of her fictional double
and acting out her projects.
My argument is organized around
the Baudrilliardian understanding of seduction as the point where
the object leads the subject on, in a 'fatal strategy'. But as
well as considering Calle's work as an act of seduction, and
Baudrillard's own 'homeopathic' response, the paper explores
its effects in the light of psychoanalytic theories of compulsion,
Jean Laplanche's re-formulation of Freud's notorious seduction
theory, and sociological theories of modernity.
But as much as her work suggests
seduction, it more immediately evokes stalking. Stalking in its
pathological guise is clearly seduction gone wrong, or seduction
that fails to interpellate its target ~ a seduction in other
words without the successful se-duire (the leading astray
of the other by making the other lead him/herself astray). Stalking
in its 'cultural' form, as represented by Calle's work, leads
us to ponder an important shift in our culture when it comes
to the relationship between subject and object. Where the representative
figure of modernity was the flâneur, is the postmodern
equivalent now the stalker?
As the writer Iain Sinclair puts
it, 'The concept of "strolling", aimless urban wandering,
the flâneur, had been superseded. We had moved into the
age of the stalker; journeys made with intent ~ sharp-eyed and
unsponsored [...] This was walking with a thesis. With a prey.
[...] The stalker is a stroller who sweats, a stroller who knows
where he is going, but not why or how.' (Lights Out for the
Territory 75).
While Sinclair captures the peculiar
mixture of purpose and aimlessness, control and paranoia that
characterizes 'cultural' stalking, he is of course wrong about
the flâneur. The aimlessness of flânerie is only
a disguise for its real objective: to read the city and its inhabitants.
(Though Sinclair is right in that such an attitude to urban life
seems entirely incompatible today, where we are more likely to
feel that the city is reading us.) Where the flâneur sought
to decode the mysteries of the world around him through a peculiar
analytical detachment, the stalker gets much closer ~ too close
~ to his/her object. Is this, to return to Baudrillard, the condition
of the subject in postmodernity?
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Deborah Philips
teaches in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Brunel
University.
She has written on popular culture and popular fiction for women,
and is the co-author (with Ian Haywood) of Brave New Causes
(Cassell, 1998), co-editor of (with Neil Ravenscroft and Marion
Bennett) of Tourism and Visitor Attractions (LSA, 1998)
and (with Liz Linington and Debra Penman) of Writing Well
~ Creative Writing and Mental Health (Jessica Kingsley, 1999).
She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of the Journal
of the Leisure Studies Association, Leisure Studies.
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Dr. Deborah
Philips
TRANSFORMATION
SCENES: THE TELEVISION MAKEOVER
The transformation
or 'makeover' of people and of places has long been a standard
feature of popular women s magazines and is now a dominant form
of television. The television design programme offers an uneasy
interface between the private world of the domestic and the public
world of television, a tension apparent in the conventions which
surround the encounter between ordinary people and television
personalities in programmes such as Home Front and Changing Rooms.
The magic of television promises that the old fashioned, the
dowdy, the tasteless can be transformed through the expertise
of designers and experts. The paper will address the transformation
of gardeners and designers into television personalities, and
argue that the experts of the television makeover show act as
tastemakers. The paper will suggest that the growth of the transformation
programme on television is bound up with the privatization of
property and with the rising cost of housing, and that knowledge
of interior design is explicitly understood in the language of
these programmes as a capital investment.
Using Bourdieu, this paper will
suggest that, while claiming a democratization of taste, such
programmes serve to confirm the superior knowledge and cultural
capital of the expert. The subjects of the makeover are narratively
required to accept the dictates of the tastemaker and, in that
acceptance, to erase the traces of their own habitus in favour
of a commodification of taste and style.
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Alan Read
is Professor and Chair of Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies
at University of Surrey Roehampton. He is author of Theatre and Everyday
Life: An Ethics of Performance (1993), and editor of The
Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation
(1996). He recently published a set of essays exploring space,
place, architecture and artistic practice, Architecturally
Speaking: Practices of Art, Architecture and the Everyday
(2000).
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Prof. Alan
Read
RETURN TO
SENDER: THE REVOLUTION OF THE ROUNDABOUT
I have been
working recently in a number of 'rational' housing (projects,
estates, HLM) exploring the performative means through which
residents disturb, conform, tease, adapt, decorate and transform
the ordering principles of architecture and location they live
within. The residential areas include the Alton Estates in West
London (next to the location of the LSA conference in Froebel
College), the Romerstadt in Frankfurt, the Beljmeer in Amsterdam,
Cabrini Green in Chicago and the forerunnner of each of these
projects, the Unite D'Habitation in Marseille.
A number of 'leisure' related footnotes
or side bars to this research have begun to emerge (though of
course the term in this context would require careful scrutiny).
I have become interested in the adaptive use made of CCTV security
cameras in a number of these areas by young people 'performing
back' to the camera. I am interested in the miniature adaptation
of modular front door environments through the use of sculptural
props and adornments: gnomes, windmills, lavender, flags, Christmas
lights. I have begun to reflect on the creation of shrines and
votive offerings in under-stair chambers and lock up garages.
And I am most recently interested in thinking about the landscaping
of formal and informal playground environments and their adaptation
and uses.
Particularly striking in this context
is the emergence of what I would call an 'apparatus of rationality',
bars, frames, iron turning circles (roundabouts) that reflects
back upon and refracts the modernist principles of the emergence
of the housing environments themselves in the twentieth century.
With the gradual erasure of these abstract arenas (in some places
superceded by the narrative imperatives of the ubiquitous galleon
ship and satellite creatures ~ no roundabouts) mimicing and in
some cases preempting the postmodern cladding of the housing
in which they are situated, I am drawn to the manner in which
the playground might provide the ground for some more work.
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Garry Whannel
is Professor of Media Cultures and Director of the Centre for
International Media Analysis at the University of Luton. He has pioneered research
in media sport, television stdies and leisure cultures, co-founding
the Centre for Sport Development Research at University of Surrey
Roehampton (now the Centre for Cultural Research in Sport). Among
his recent publications is Media Sport Stars: Masculinities
and Moralities (2002).
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Prof. Garry
Whannel
THE "REAL"
AND THE "VORTEXTUAL" IN CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND CONSUMPTION
This presentation
explores a paradox in contemporary culture, between notions of
authenticity and artificiality. Among features of what some call
"postmodern culture" are self-referentiality, simulation
and hyper-reality. The processes of cultural construction have
become so all-encompassing that it supposedly no longer makes
sense to conceptualise the world in terms of "old-fashioned"
concepts like realism or reality. The media-rich environment
and the speed of circulation of information have contributed
to the establishment of a celebrity focused culture characterised
by a series of vortextual obsessions, in which events like the
Beckham wedding come to dominate, for brief moments, the media
landscape.
Yet, in so many aspects of cultural
production, there is a striking persistence of the "real"
and the "authentic", manifest in such diverse cultural
forms as reality television, world music, whole food, real beer,
adventure travelling. Real-ness has a marketability which suggests
a persistent desire to consume the real, even as we recognise
the impossibility of the project. The presentation will examine
the contradictory ways in which a desire for authenticity is
manifest, and the ways in which authenticity is commodified.
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