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DOUBLE DIALOGUES

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isssue20-02
Issue 20
Spring 2018
Why Do Things Break?

Issue 20

Why Do Things Break?

Art has a way of Breaking Through

Kathryn Keeble
Deakin University
The question is ‘Why do Things Break?’. The essays in this edition of Double Dialogues deal with the three abiding themes of literature, film, art and life: birth, loving/hating and death.

Thermodynamic Sonata

Anamaria Beligan
Anamaria Beligan and Valeriu Campan’s documentary In the Latitude of North, In the Longitude of East, was shot in a psychiatric hospital that did not appear on any map in Romania during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s repressive twenty-year regime. Beligan reflects on her life post breaking into taboo territory

That pain between the canvass and the paint

Călin-Andrei Mihăilescu
Western University, London, Canada
Mihăilescu utilises his poetic eye to comment on Ceaușescu’s broken Romania.

Paris, August 1948

Kathryn Keeble
Deakin University
In Paris, in the aftermath of the nightmare that was the Second World War, two iconic writers of the twentieth century, Brendan Behan and Samuel Beckett, met. What did they discuss, both on the eve of writing their greatest works?

Breaking Out

Kay Are
University of Melbourne
Interpretative commentary, translation, genre innovation all break from an “original” acting as a separation in a way that discloses the inherent susceptibility of the original to breakage. Where any of these instruments — commentary, translation, innovation — breaks a text open, a topos dilates.

Enigmas in Philip Guston’s de Chirico City

Deborah Walker
The coupling of artists, Giorgio de Chirico and Philip Guston, despite Guston’s recognition of de Chirico as a major influence, can seem perplexing. Walker breaks open connection between these enigmatic twentieth-century artists.

Instances of Anomaly

Ben Howe
Certain realities are presented during instances of anomaly — the moments when systems break down — where things don’t come together as expected. In these artworks, alternative narrative images are taken apart, elements are shared between objects, and our experience of temporality is hijacked.

Break Down

Gabrielle Everall
University of Western Australia
Systems rarely examine everyday assumptions enabling a chasm to open up between what is said and its meaning. Everall conceptualises trauma through recounting a harrowing tale and conceptualises breakdown and trauma.

Nervous

Amelia Walker
University of South Australia
Drawing on ideas from RD Laing and Michel Foucault, Walker reflects on how mental health is, and has been, understood and often misunderstood, and reconceives this ‘break’ in various ways that don’t necessarily have to be ‘down’.

Brokenness and Restoration

Kevin Sarlow
Flinders University
Irony and breakages go together, especially when people’s lives are concerned. Sarlow’s spiritual lament relates the irony of his own brokenness through ageing.

Razing Red Square

Samantha Young
Monash University
Razing Red Square is a narrative reflection on the breakup of the Soviet Union and a meditation on memory, family and exile through the eyes of Alex, a journalist sent to Moscow on assignment.

Legal Rupture, Legal Order

Tilly Houghton
University of Melbourne
Houghton examines three events that reflect how the law is unable to address the crowd, and the protest, in its entirety. It is the protest that is the point at which the law is not merely broken or disrupted, but entirely ruptured.

There’s No Escaping the Bay Window

James Hayes
Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
Richard Yates’ 1961 novel 'Revolutionary Road' examines a marriage that is slowly broken apart by life in the suburban America. Here, Hayes examines the role that the actual, physical suburb itself plays in that breaking.

The ‘Bad Mother’

Alicia Carter
Flinders University
What does it mean to be the ‘bad mother’? What does it mean when, in the breaking open of the mother’s body, the connection to child is severed as well? Through prose and monologue, Carter probes the question of why, in a relationship we hold as sacred, the maternal bond is sometimes broken.

Chipping In

Cynthia Troup
With reference to the artist Louise Bourgeois, Troup endeavours to make sense of grief and memory following the sudden death of her own father.

Industry and the Arts

Alex McCulloch
McCulloch recounts the trials and tribulations of getting a ground-breaking and inspiring art project from the drawing board to the walls of the Sydney CBD.

Loss and survival, the personal and the political, ideologies, scientific paradigms, medical and legal practice are seen to crack, splinter and fragment in these essays. The contributors to this, the twentieth issue of Double Dialogues, scrutinise these universal and enduring themes and seek to identify ruptures and fractures, to illuminate breaking hearts, broken systems and even death, in order to answer the question why did this break when it did.

 

Double Dialogues | Refereed Arts Journal | ISSN 1447-9591  
© Double Dialogues 2020 unless otherwise credited