Papers by Costanza Bergo
This thesis looks at the video works of Australian artist Tracey Moffatt, regarding them as start... more This thesis looks at the video works of Australian artist Tracey Moffatt, regarding them as starting points for an investigation into affect in relation to place. It wishes to consider the body in space - the body as a mean to think geographically - and space in the body - as spaces are made places through our bond with them. The text looks at Film sets as evidence of the landscape as lexicon; Moffatt’s often surreal, expressionist sets function at the intersection between internal and external landscape, unveiling the land as bearer.
In the postcolonial context of contemporary Australian society, I consider how the land may assume the quality of traumatic contact zone, a site susceptible to ‘hauntings’. The intent, here, is one that considers Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading practices; that is, one that proposes imaginative solutions to oppression. In the case of this text, such proposed solution lay in an affective turn within the Humanities, one that widens the borders of what experiences and styles of articulation can be recorded into history.
I will proceed to investigate, in line with Rosalyn Deutsche’s claim, the potential problematics ... more I will proceed to investigate, in line with Rosalyn Deutsche’s claim, the potential problematics of advocating for a unitary method of activism that relegates all other strategies to quietism: a gendered dichotomy of militance that sees only active-based methods as dignified, in fact, excludes a large portion of important debates and analytic strategies that can facilitate social change. I will therefore relate back this theoretical framework and arguments to the specific aesthetics of Maypole - Take No Prisoners to conclude that abstract, contemporary political art holds tremendous potential in providing a context for a psychoanalytical analysis of political events; that its depiction of absolute violence and affective notions of war can provide us with beneficial platforms for self accountability and reflection, and that therefore its efficacy and potential ought not to be undervalued.
19th Century British visual culture is characterised by a proliferation of images with fantastic... more 19th Century British visual culture is characterised by a proliferation of images with fantastic themes. As poignantly noted by Nina Auerbach, Victorian imagination remains essentially otherworldly and supernatural, despite its aim to be scientific, moral and rational. [...]
What, however, remains largely overlooked, is a particularly ambiguous figure that pervasively surfaces within the arts of the period. I am referring to the female -and much more recurrent- counterparts to the Victorian monster: the lamias and sirens, Eves, witches and fairies that overpopulate Victorian paintings. Largely, these images have been classed as part of a general European trend. [...]
What I instead set upon in this dissertation is to consider British artworks as a separate and distinct phenomenon. I believe, in fact, that peculiar features of beauty and passivity set these images aside from their much more feral German or French counterparts; and, moreover, that the success and praise that these paintings received in their time makes them unique and worthy of investigation. I intend to investigate the reasons behind the appeal of these artworks, and their potential function. I will, in fact, argue that these images play a powerfully exorcising role, simultaneously othering and appropriating the figure of what is ultimately a wayward female, under the mask of wings and spells. By creating a very specific and fetishised narrative of women’s transgression, I argue that male artists fashioned a powerfully prescriptive fiction that limited and dictated the way in which women could transgress, therefore redefining female rebellion through a language of spectacle, femininity, sexuality and male pleasure that accommodated it within hegemonic culture.
The dead woman’s passivity -and the inherent passivity of death- seems to increase her eroticism:... more The dead woman’s passivity -and the inherent passivity of death- seems to increase her eroticism: Ophelia is immobile, “incapable of her own distress”, completely at the visual mercy of the viewer. Drowning, Ruth J. Owen observes, is the antithesis of the pronouncement that affirms life: the drowned woman is silenced by water, her voice killed even before her authentic death. Stripped of all powers but her beauty’s, she becomes an object to be consumed by the viewer; as Sontag argues, “violence turns anybody subjected to it into a thing”. There is no invitation to identify with the silent muse, only to admire her: her death is instrumental to the viewer’s pleasure.
While landscape art has been considered as an approved vehicle of the articulation of class and r... more While landscape art has been considered as an approved vehicle of the articulation of class and racial relations, as well as imperialism, colonialism and nationalism, gender has, as a rule, been absent from artistic analysis of landscape. Still, “gender has imprinted and continues to imprint itself on the landscape in a myriad of forms”. The cultural construction of land itself is traditionally sexed: Nature is female, as is the Earth; the land can be “Virgin”, conquered via the odyssey of a customarily male explorer; sites can be spoiled, ideal, forbidden or untouched. The language of geography can be remarkably similar to the sexual one, a dichotomy defined by activity and passivity.
The natural world, therefore, is gendered in ways; and furthermore, for a long time so was the artist: pre contemporary culture -art history, even- speaks of creativity being male, unmatched by female’s procreativity. The male landscape artist can therefore -willingly or accidentally- identify and be identified with the combined gendered roles of male artist and explorer. Considering in addition that women’s access to travel, the land and the outdoors in general, has been historically restricted, with male and female (artists or not) enjoying very different admittance onto the “imaginary and real space that makes up landscape art”, and the argument naturally forms - ought landscape art be reconsidered in light of gender?
In this essay I will be arguing that pornographic material has the power to silence women, in rel... more In this essay I will be arguing that pornographic material has the power to silence women, in relation to Rae Langton’s theory of perlocutionary and illocutionary silencing. For this purpose, I will analyse a project involving rape survivors that reports their attacker’s statements as the rape was occurring. By doing this I hope to demonstrate that it is plausible to claim that sexual attackers often fail to recognize that the victims are genuinely unwilling and non-consenting. I will consequently look at pornography as a possible source of confusion: I will present examples of pornographic storylines that perpetuate rape myths and portray women as enjoying violence. I will then proceed to list empirical evidence of how our perception of what is sexually alluring can be conditioned by visual representations, to demonstrate that pornography has at least the potential of conditioning power. Ultimately, I will conclude that pornography, by conditioning its viewers to believe that a woman’s refusal is not significant, takes away women’s ability to refuse sex and/or to be understood as refusing it.
The cultural construction and imagery of the fallen woman shifted prostitution from threatening f... more The cultural construction and imagery of the fallen woman shifted prostitution from threatening force and offered an alternative narrative, which defined the prostitute as desperate victim of her ways. If the prostitute was regretful and penitent, middle-class morality had to be correct; and if she was dedicated to her self-destruction, she could not possibly present a noteworthy capacity for social upheaval.
Drafts by Costanza Bergo
Millet did share Baudelaire’s belief in both the need and appeal of depicting and canonizing the ... more Millet did share Baudelaire’s belief in both the need and appeal of depicting and canonizing the tumultuous present. He had been educated with the Bible and Virgil, and had read widely from Friedrich Grimm to Charlotte Bronte; upon his arrival in Paris, he educated himself with Vasari Le Vite dei Pittori and the masters at the Louvre. He could have easily produced Classical and mythological images, in respect to the tradition; but while his art was never free from citations and mythological associations (Pollock defines his art as capable of ranging from Fragonard’s pastoralism to “the darkest moments of Spanish art”), the figures that inhabit it are no Aeneas or Christ. He wrote to Sensier, “One must be able to make use of the trivial to express the sublime, there is the real force”. Indeed he populated his paintings with nameless figures, and became by choice a painter of peasants, as his obituary defined him.
Pastoral and Anti Pastoral, 2022
Thesis Chapters by Costanza Bergo
My project articulates and examines the notion of a settler-colonial structure of feeling through... more My project articulates and examines the notion of a settler-colonial structure of feeling through visual analysis of landscape in Australian film, art and popular culture from post- World War II to the present day. The focus of such investigation is not the overt intentions of representations of landscape, but rather the unrepresentable tensions they aim to conceal.
The thesis theorises a relationship of interdependence between the physical occupation of territory and the production of images that represent those territories as landscape. The thesis considers the role of landscape representation within the ongoing performance of possession that settler colonies rely upon for the (re)production of sovereignty. As Tuck and Yang argue, land is the main preoccupation of settler colonialism. Landscape repre- sentation, in turn, indexes the settler-colonial cultural perception of land. The very con- cept of an ‘Australian landscape’ is rooted in the epistemology of colonialism: the settler- colonial nation relies on its subjects to continuously conceptualise its national landscape not as occupied territories belonging to Indigenous peoples but as an undisputed sov- ereign white nation called Australia. Settler-colonial landscape is one of the tools through which the settler colony circulates and enacts the denial mechanisms it depends on. My project brings together Wolfe’s articulation of settler-colonialism as structure with Ray- mond Williams’ notion of ‘structure of feeling’. It does so to theorise and analyse a ‘set- tler-colonial structure of feeling’—the inherently ambivalent network of unconscious dri- ves that both uphold and disrupt the settler-colonial project.
My project maps settler denial through various terrains. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the co- constitution of anxiety and pleasure in representations of the landscape within the settler imagination. Chapter 3 focuses on land as property and examines the settler home and garden to disentangle the complex relationship between care and violence that charac- terises everyday life in the contemporary settler state. Finally, Chapter 4 moves to the coast and beach to examine the death-line of the border. Each chapter builds its argu- ment through visual analysis of diverse media, ranging from tourism advertisements to feature films and artworks, all analysed from a perspective that brings together art history, settler-colonial studies and cultural studies.
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Papers by Costanza Bergo
In the postcolonial context of contemporary Australian society, I consider how the land may assume the quality of traumatic contact zone, a site susceptible to ‘hauntings’. The intent, here, is one that considers Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading practices; that is, one that proposes imaginative solutions to oppression. In the case of this text, such proposed solution lay in an affective turn within the Humanities, one that widens the borders of what experiences and styles of articulation can be recorded into history.
What, however, remains largely overlooked, is a particularly ambiguous figure that pervasively surfaces within the arts of the period. I am referring to the female -and much more recurrent- counterparts to the Victorian monster: the lamias and sirens, Eves, witches and fairies that overpopulate Victorian paintings. Largely, these images have been classed as part of a general European trend. [...]
What I instead set upon in this dissertation is to consider British artworks as a separate and distinct phenomenon. I believe, in fact, that peculiar features of beauty and passivity set these images aside from their much more feral German or French counterparts; and, moreover, that the success and praise that these paintings received in their time makes them unique and worthy of investigation. I intend to investigate the reasons behind the appeal of these artworks, and their potential function. I will, in fact, argue that these images play a powerfully exorcising role, simultaneously othering and appropriating the figure of what is ultimately a wayward female, under the mask of wings and spells. By creating a very specific and fetishised narrative of women’s transgression, I argue that male artists fashioned a powerfully prescriptive fiction that limited and dictated the way in which women could transgress, therefore redefining female rebellion through a language of spectacle, femininity, sexuality and male pleasure that accommodated it within hegemonic culture.
The natural world, therefore, is gendered in ways; and furthermore, for a long time so was the artist: pre contemporary culture -art history, even- speaks of creativity being male, unmatched by female’s procreativity. The male landscape artist can therefore -willingly or accidentally- identify and be identified with the combined gendered roles of male artist and explorer. Considering in addition that women’s access to travel, the land and the outdoors in general, has been historically restricted, with male and female (artists or not) enjoying very different admittance onto the “imaginary and real space that makes up landscape art”, and the argument naturally forms - ought landscape art be reconsidered in light of gender?
Drafts by Costanza Bergo
Thesis Chapters by Costanza Bergo
The thesis theorises a relationship of interdependence between the physical occupation of territory and the production of images that represent those territories as landscape. The thesis considers the role of landscape representation within the ongoing performance of possession that settler colonies rely upon for the (re)production of sovereignty. As Tuck and Yang argue, land is the main preoccupation of settler colonialism. Landscape repre- sentation, in turn, indexes the settler-colonial cultural perception of land. The very con- cept of an ‘Australian landscape’ is rooted in the epistemology of colonialism: the settler- colonial nation relies on its subjects to continuously conceptualise its national landscape not as occupied territories belonging to Indigenous peoples but as an undisputed sov- ereign white nation called Australia. Settler-colonial landscape is one of the tools through which the settler colony circulates and enacts the denial mechanisms it depends on. My project brings together Wolfe’s articulation of settler-colonialism as structure with Ray- mond Williams’ notion of ‘structure of feeling’. It does so to theorise and analyse a ‘set- tler-colonial structure of feeling’—the inherently ambivalent network of unconscious dri- ves that both uphold and disrupt the settler-colonial project.
My project maps settler denial through various terrains. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the co- constitution of anxiety and pleasure in representations of the landscape within the settler imagination. Chapter 3 focuses on land as property and examines the settler home and garden to disentangle the complex relationship between care and violence that charac- terises everyday life in the contemporary settler state. Finally, Chapter 4 moves to the coast and beach to examine the death-line of the border. Each chapter builds its argu- ment through visual analysis of diverse media, ranging from tourism advertisements to feature films and artworks, all analysed from a perspective that brings together art history, settler-colonial studies and cultural studies.
In the postcolonial context of contemporary Australian society, I consider how the land may assume the quality of traumatic contact zone, a site susceptible to ‘hauntings’. The intent, here, is one that considers Sedgwick’s notion of reparative reading practices; that is, one that proposes imaginative solutions to oppression. In the case of this text, such proposed solution lay in an affective turn within the Humanities, one that widens the borders of what experiences and styles of articulation can be recorded into history.
What, however, remains largely overlooked, is a particularly ambiguous figure that pervasively surfaces within the arts of the period. I am referring to the female -and much more recurrent- counterparts to the Victorian monster: the lamias and sirens, Eves, witches and fairies that overpopulate Victorian paintings. Largely, these images have been classed as part of a general European trend. [...]
What I instead set upon in this dissertation is to consider British artworks as a separate and distinct phenomenon. I believe, in fact, that peculiar features of beauty and passivity set these images aside from their much more feral German or French counterparts; and, moreover, that the success and praise that these paintings received in their time makes them unique and worthy of investigation. I intend to investigate the reasons behind the appeal of these artworks, and their potential function. I will, in fact, argue that these images play a powerfully exorcising role, simultaneously othering and appropriating the figure of what is ultimately a wayward female, under the mask of wings and spells. By creating a very specific and fetishised narrative of women’s transgression, I argue that male artists fashioned a powerfully prescriptive fiction that limited and dictated the way in which women could transgress, therefore redefining female rebellion through a language of spectacle, femininity, sexuality and male pleasure that accommodated it within hegemonic culture.
The natural world, therefore, is gendered in ways; and furthermore, for a long time so was the artist: pre contemporary culture -art history, even- speaks of creativity being male, unmatched by female’s procreativity. The male landscape artist can therefore -willingly or accidentally- identify and be identified with the combined gendered roles of male artist and explorer. Considering in addition that women’s access to travel, the land and the outdoors in general, has been historically restricted, with male and female (artists or not) enjoying very different admittance onto the “imaginary and real space that makes up landscape art”, and the argument naturally forms - ought landscape art be reconsidered in light of gender?
The thesis theorises a relationship of interdependence between the physical occupation of territory and the production of images that represent those territories as landscape. The thesis considers the role of landscape representation within the ongoing performance of possession that settler colonies rely upon for the (re)production of sovereignty. As Tuck and Yang argue, land is the main preoccupation of settler colonialism. Landscape repre- sentation, in turn, indexes the settler-colonial cultural perception of land. The very con- cept of an ‘Australian landscape’ is rooted in the epistemology of colonialism: the settler- colonial nation relies on its subjects to continuously conceptualise its national landscape not as occupied territories belonging to Indigenous peoples but as an undisputed sov- ereign white nation called Australia. Settler-colonial landscape is one of the tools through which the settler colony circulates and enacts the denial mechanisms it depends on. My project brings together Wolfe’s articulation of settler-colonialism as structure with Ray- mond Williams’ notion of ‘structure of feeling’. It does so to theorise and analyse a ‘set- tler-colonial structure of feeling’—the inherently ambivalent network of unconscious dri- ves that both uphold and disrupt the settler-colonial project.
My project maps settler denial through various terrains. Chapters 1 and 2 examine the co- constitution of anxiety and pleasure in representations of the landscape within the settler imagination. Chapter 3 focuses on land as property and examines the settler home and garden to disentangle the complex relationship between care and violence that charac- terises everyday life in the contemporary settler state. Finally, Chapter 4 moves to the coast and beach to examine the death-line of the border. Each chapter builds its argu- ment through visual analysis of diverse media, ranging from tourism advertisements to feature films and artworks, all analysed from a perspective that brings together art history, settler-colonial studies and cultural studies.