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Absolutely Revolting

October 2024, no. 469

This month ABR sharpens its memory, looking back at Australia’s involvement in East Timor on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its liberation. We ask what the US invasion of Afghanistan revealed, how referendums have been lost and won, and if we’ve heeded the lessons of the pandemic. Bridget Griffen-Foley reviews a book on media moguls, Scott Stephens explains why 2024 looks a lot like 1939, and we consider ancient India’s transformation of the world. Shannon Burns, Michael Winkler, Heather Neilson and Alex Cothren review novels from Robbie Arnott, Brian Castro, Emily Maquire and Malcolm Knox. ABR Arts interviews pianist Angela Hewitt and reviews The Australian Ballet’s Oscar and MTC’s Topdog/Underdog. There’s Proust, Shakespeare, new poetry, poetry reviews and more.

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Peter McPhee reviews ‘Paris in Ruins: Love, war, and the birth of Impressionism’ by Sebastian Smee
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Article Title: ‘Impression, sunrise’
Article Subtitle: Art and politics collide in a pulsating narrative
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No movement in the history of art is so beloved as that which we label ‘Impressionism’, and no artists’ names are as familiar as those of its stars: Manet and Monet, Pissarro and Morisot, Degas and Renoir. But why did Impressionism blossom at a particular moment in Paris and in that form? Sebastian Smee’s brilliant new book offers compelling answers.
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Alt Tag (Featured Image): Peter McPhee reviews ‘Paris in Ruins: Love, war, and the birth of Impressionism’ by Sebastian Smee
Book 1 Title: Paris in Ruins
Book 1 Subtitle: Love, war, and the birth of Impressionism
Book Author: Sebastian Smee
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $36.99 pb, 381 pp
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Book 1 Readings Link: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781923058057/paris-in-ruins--sebastian-smee--2024--9781923058057#rac:jokjjzr6ly9m
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No movement in the history of art is so beloved as that which we label ‘Impressionism’, and no artists’ names are as familiar as those of its stars: Manet and Monet, Pissarro and Morisot, Degas and Renoir. But why did Impressionism blossom at a particular moment in Paris and in that form? Sebastian Smee’s brilliant new book offers compelling answers.

Educated in Adelaide and at the University of Sydney before becoming national art critic for The Australian, Smee moved to the United States in 2008 to write for the Boston Globe. He is now art critic for The Washington Post. As well as books on Lucian Freud, Picasso, and Matisse, Smee is well known for The Art of Rivalry (2016), which probed the relationships between four pairs of artists: Matisse and Picasso, de Kooning and Pollock, Freud and Bacon, and Degas and Monet. He won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his ‘vivid and exuberant writing about art, often bringing great works to life with love and appreciation’. Paris in Ruins is no exception.

Read more: Peter McPhee reviews ‘Paris in Ruins: Love, war, and the birth of Impressionism’ by Sebastian Smee

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Marika Vicziany reviews ‘The Golden Road: How ancient India transformed the world’ by William Dalrymple
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Contents Category: India
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Article Title: Indic ideas
Article Subtitle: A journey across the globe
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William Dalrymple’s tour de force avoids all the pit-falls of superpower competition, identity politics, and over-simplification, but nonetheless places Indian cultural and economic achievements at the centre of the changing worlds of the West and Asia from c.250 bce to 1200 ce. The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the world explains how and why Indian influence in China reached a high-water mark ‘never to be reached again’ during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian (the Fifth Concubine), who died at the age of eighty-one in 705 ce, having ruled China for some fifty years.
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Book 1 Title: The Golden Road
Book 1 Subtitle: How ancient India transformed the world
Book Author: William Dalrymple
Book 1 Biblio: Bloomsbury, $39.99 pb, 479 pp
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Book 1 Readings Link: https://www.readings.com.au/product/9781408864425/the-golden-road--william-dalrymple--2024--9781408864425#rac:jokjjzr6ly9m
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William Dalrymple’s tour de force avoids all the pit-falls of superpower competition, identity politics, and over-simplification, but nonetheless places Indian cultural and economic achievements at the centre of the changing worlds of the West and Asia from c.250 bce to 1200 ce. The Golden Road: How Ancient India transformed the world explains how and why Indian influence in China reached a high-water mark ‘never to be reached again’ during the reign of Empress Wu Zetian (the Fifth Concubine), who died at the age of eighty-one in 705 ce, having ruled China for some fifty years.

Wu Zetian’s zealous patronage saw Buddhism become the dominant religion of China. As Dalrymple writes, ‘never again would the civilisation of India and China be bound together so intimately’. Today, about half of the world’s 500 million Buddhists live in China. There is a stream of cultural exchange involving Buddhists visiting important centres of learning in India and China. The world’s remaining Buddhists belong to a long history of the migration of monks, teachers, ideas, traders, and pilgrims between the home of Buddhism in northern India and other parts of Asia and Central Asia. Borobudur in Indonesia, for instance, remains the largest Buddhist temple ever built. This and many other cultural icons prompt Dalrymple to suggest that Buddhism has been one of the greatest transformational influences in world history. Given the pivotal role of India in that process, the book represents a critical counterpoint to the existing scholarly work that focuses much more on the Chinese-Central, Asian-Persian spheres of influence.

Read more: Marika Vicziany reviews ‘The Golden Road: How ancient India transformed the world’ by William...

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Tim Byrne reviews ‘Straight Acting’ by Will Tosh and ‘The Hollow Crown’ by Eliot A. Cohen
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Contents Category: Shakespeare
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Article Title: Veils and disguises
Article Subtitle: The everlastingly multifarious Shakespeare
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Shakespeare’s world view – his multiplicity and pluralism, all that teeming vitality crashing up against itself – acts like a tabula rasa even when it is precisely the opposite: one can project oneself onto his work not because it is a blank slate but because it contains multitudes. When it comes to his actual opinions, however – his inclinations and proclivities, his personal, political, and spiritual beliefs – he is notoriously difficult to pin down. One of his greatest skills, after all, is a consummate ability to play both sides of an argument.
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Alt Tag (Featured Image): Tim Byrne reviews ‘Straight Acting’ by Will Tosh and ‘The Hollow Crown’ by Eliot A. Cohen
Book 1 Title: Straight Acting
Book 1 Subtitle: The many queer lives of William Shakespeare
Book Author: Will Tosh
Book 1 Biblio: Sceptre, $34.99 pb, 292 pp
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Book 2 Title: The Hollow Crown
Book 2 Subtitle: Shakespeare on how leaders rise, rule, and fall
Book 2 Author: Eliot A. Cohen
Book 2 Biblio: Basic Books, $55 hb, 277 pp
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Shakespeare’s world view – his multiplicity and pluralism, all that teeming vitality crashing up against itself – acts like a tabula rasa even when it is precisely the opposite: one can project oneself onto his work not because it is a blank slate but because it contains multitudes. When it comes to his actual opinions, however – his inclinations and proclivities, his personal, political, and spiritual beliefs – he is notoriously difficult to pin down. One of his greatest skills, after all, is a consummate ability to play both sides of an argument.

Books about Shakespeare tend, therefore, to tell us more about their authors than they do about the playwright, although they are no less valid for this. Two recent additions to the scholarly ephemera make the case that, even when we might feel a subject is exhausted, there is always something new to illuminate.

Read more: Tim Byrne reviews ‘Straight Acting’ by Will Tosh and ‘The Hollow Crown’ by Eliot A. Cohen

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Richard Leathem reviews ‘Law at the Movies: Turning legal doctrine into art’ by Stanley Fish
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Contents Category: Film Studies
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Article Title: ‘Law is the one’
Article Subtitle: Anatomy of a film genre
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Author and literary theorist Stanley Fish is, among other things, a professor of law specialising in constitutional law, media law, the First Amendment, and jurisprudence. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that over the course of his book Law at the Movies he shows a forensic knowledge of the judicial system in the United States. This is no casual checklist of films that feature lawyers as characters, but a dissection of how particular statutes and legal procedures are represented on screen. He conveys how, in the hands of gifted filmmakers, ‘dry as dust soil of legal doctrine flowers into something truly substantive and dramatically compelling’.
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Book 1 Title: Law at the Movies
Book 1 Subtitle: Turning legal doctrine into art
Book Author: Stanley Fish
Book 1 Biblio: Oxford University, Press £25 hb, 211 pp
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Author and literary theorist Stanley Fish is, among other things, a professor of law specialising in constitutional law, media law, the First Amendment, and jurisprudence. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that over the course of his book Law at the Movies he shows a forensic knowledge of the judicial system in the United States. This is no casual checklist of films that feature lawyers as characters, but a dissection of how particular statutes and legal procedures are represented on screen. He conveys how, in the hands of gifted filmmakers, ‘dry as dust soil of legal doctrine flowers into something truly substantive and dramatically compelling’.

Through filmic examples, Fish poses fundamental questions. What is law? How is it established? What is the source of legal authority? What compels obedience to the law? What is the relationship between law and morality?

Read more: Richard Leathem reviews ‘Law at the Movies: Turning legal doctrine into art’ by Stanley Fish

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Declan Fry reviews ‘Nonhuman Witnessing: War, data, and ecology after the end of the world’ by Michael Richardson
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Contents Category: Cultural Studies
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Article Title: Inside meatspace
Article Subtitle: A new world of technical agency
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In Vex Ashley’s film Machine Learning Experiments, a body – she, they, he, them, take your pick – is penetrated by a luminescent black tube. The body’s boundaries dissolve in the pleasure of becoming: animate/inanimate, human/non-human, interior and exterior, inorganic and inorganic. Backed by the steady pulse of Boy Harsher’s Augustus Muller, the series’ tripartite sequence – ‘Automation’, ‘Orgone Theory’, ‘Hydra’ (this last ‘about invading and consuming’) – offers a psychosocial exploration of transmission and penetrability of all kinds.
Book 1 Title: Nonhuman Witnessing
Book 1 Subtitle: War, data, and ecology after the end of the world
Book Author: Michael Richardson
Book 1 Biblio: Duke University Press, US$26.95 pb, 256 pp
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In Vex Ashley’s film Machine Learning Experiments, a body – she, they, he, them, take your pick – is penetrated by a luminescent black tube. The body’s boundaries dissolve in the pleasure of becoming: animate/inanimate, human/non-human, interior and exterior, inorganic and inorganic. Backed by the steady pulse of Boy Harsher’s Augustus Muller, the series’ tripartite sequence – ‘Automation’, ‘Orgone Theory’, ‘Hydra’ (this last ‘about invading and consuming’) – offers a psychosocial exploration of transmission and penetrability of all kinds.

Can mediation mean otherwise? Is there a vision of the human body within the machine that is not fetishistic compulsion, technofuturist kink, colonial yuppie wet dream? (I do not mean to impute shame or implications of abnormality to anyone’s compulsions or kinks; all of these responses, insofar as they do not turn others into resources, are potentially valid psychosexual links to a violent world.) Zones of extraction emerge: the ability to touch what is distant in time and space, yet still rendered safe by the confines of meditation. This yields an attractive value proposition for commercial forces seeking to turn material and psychic objects and rituals into commodities.

Read more: Declan Fry reviews ‘Nonhuman Witnessing: War, data, and ecology after the end of the world’ by...

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