![Sample our Language & Literature journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5941/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Language-Literature.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
Perspective dominates the writing on colonial art. Conceptualized as a way of seeing that inherently supports the processes of colonial conquest and control, its use in colonial art is routinely linked to an overseeing and all-powerful ‘colonial gaze’. It is surprising, then, that upon return to the supposed source of this idea, the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, you will find that he continually associates the ‘gaze’ not with perspective but anamorphosis. Undertaking a close study of several inter-related Australian works by the British travel artist, Augustus Earle, in this article I seek to look again at colonial art by placing perspective to one side. In shifting the focus from perspective to anamorphosis, I will be arguing for the need to consider another, often neglected and overlooked aspect to the ideology of the colonial encounter, one based on what Slavoj Žižek paradoxically refers to as a ‘pre-ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy’.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Leonard Bell, ‘Colonial eyes transformed: looking at/in paintings: an exploratory essay,’ Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art 1(1), 2000; Leonard Bell, ‘To see or not to see: conflicting eyes in the travel art of Augustus Earle,’ in Julie F. Codell and Dianne Sachko Macleod (eds.), Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998; and Leonard Bell, ‘Augustus Earle’s Meeting of the Artist and the Wounded Chief Hongi, Bay of Islands, New Zealand, 1827, and His Depictions of Other New Zealand Encounters: Contexts and Connections,’ in Alex Calder; Jonathan Lamb; and Bridget Orr (eds.), Voyages and Beaches: Pacific Encounters, 1769–1840, Honolulu: University of Hawaíi Press, 1998.
2 Bell, ‘Colonial eyes transformed,’ p 43.
3 Bell, ‘Colonial eyes transformed,’ p 44.
4 The first seminar on the topic of the gaze is titled, ‘The split between the eye and the gaze’. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book XI, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York: Norton, 1978, p 67.
5 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p 96.
6 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p 97.
7 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p 96. I have altered Alan Sheridan’s translation of this passage. Sheridan translates ‘et fait du paysage autre chose qu’une perspective’ as ‘and makes of the landscape something than a landscape’, removing Lacan’s reference to perspective. Also, I have maintained tableau in its original French rather than translate it in this instance as ‘picture’, which again does not evoke so well the specific connections to perspective that Lacan is wishing to establish. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire. Livre XI. Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, Paris: Le Seuil, 1973, p 89.
8 Sheridan rather confusingly translates, or changes, Dürer’s ‘portillon’ to Dürer’s ‘lucinda’. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p 87. Lacan, Le séminaire. Livre XI, p 81.
9 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p 87.
10 Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher S. Wood, New York: Zone Books, 1991, p 27.
11 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p 86.
12 Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, p 27.
13 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p 96.
14 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p 79.
15 Slavoj Žižek, ‘Between symbolic fiction and fantasmatic spectre: toward a Lacanian theory of ideology,’ Analysis 5, 1994, p 51.
16 Žižek, ‘Between symbolic fiction,’ p 51.
17 Žižek, ‘Between symbolic fiction,’ pp 51–2.
18 For a detailed and insightful account of Earle’s life and art, particularly as it relates to his time in Australia, see Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, Augustus Earle, Travel Artist: Paintings and Drawings in the Rex Nan Kivell Collection, National Library of Australia, Canberra: National Library of Australia, 1980.
19 Hackforth-Jones, Augustus Earle, Travel Artist, p 8.
20 Bell, ‘Colonial eyes transformed,’ p 47. Another Wellington work that includes the same recurring figure, but which I do not consider here, is Mosman’s Cave: Wellington Valley, New South Wales, No 1.
21 Andrew Sayers and Magdalene Keaney both make this identification in the same publication: Elizabeth Johns, Andrew Sayers, Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser; with Amy Ellis, New Worlds From Old: 19th Century Australian and American Landscapes, Canberra: Thames & Hudson, 1998. (Andrew Sayers, ‘The shaping of Australian landscape painting,’ p 56; Magdalene Keaney, catalogue entry for Wentworth Falls (A Waterfall in Australia), p 97).
22 Tracey Ireland, with Ingereth Macfarlane, Aedeen Cremin, Linda Young, and Neil Urwin, Maynggu Ganai Historic Site: Wellington Valley 1823–1844, Draft Conversation Management Plan, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, March 2004, p 38. https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/-/media/OEH/Corporate-Site/Documents/Parks-reserves-and-protected-areas/Conservation-management-plans/maynggu-ganai-historic-site-draft-conservation-management-plan-040164.pdf. On this issue of identification, the document draws upon David Roberts, ‘Historical background of the Wellington Valley settlement with notes on construction and habitation and an inventory of buildings’, 2000, an unpublished report for Anne Bickford Heritage Consultants.
23 Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, New York: Verso, 2013, p 682.
24 This is a rift related to what Michael Rosenthal first noted as the juxtaposition between the verticality of the column and the ‘ramrod straight Aborigine behind whose back the ordering lines of fences and enclosures are imposed on his lands’. Michael Rosenthal, ‘The Extraordinary Mr Earle,’ in Seona Doherty and Michelle Hetherington (eds.), The World Upside Down: Australia 1788–1830, Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2000, p 39.
25 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p 55.
26 Bell, ‘Colonial eyes transformed,’ p 48.
27 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p 208.
28 Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, p 86.
29 Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink, NY: Norton, 2006, p 681.
30 The ‘undergrowth of enjoyment’ is the title of a chapter in Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
31 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p 124.
32 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p 124.
33 Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p 125.
34 Hubert Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting, trans. Janet Lloyd, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002, p 123; Hubert Damisch, Théorie du nuage. Pour une histoire de la peinture, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972, p 169.
35 Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, p 127; Damisch, Théorie du nuage, p 178.
36 Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, p 124; Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, p 94.
37 Damisch, A Theory of /Cloud/, p 124.
38 Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, pp 93–4.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Keith Broadfoot
Keith Broadfoot is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Art History at the University of Sydney, Australia. His recent publications have appeared in Art History, Angelaki, and the Journal of Art Historiography.