Paolo Magagnoli | The University of Queensland, Australia (original) (raw)
Books by Paolo Magagnoli
University of Columbia Press/Wallflower, May 12, 2015
This timely volume discusses the experimental documentary projects of some of the most significan... more This timely volume discusses the experimental documentary projects of some of the most significant artists working in the world today: Hito Steyerl, Joachim Koester, Tacita Dean, Matthew Buckingham, Zoe Leonard, Jean-Luc Moulène, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, and Anri Sala. Their films, videos, and photographic series address failed utopian experiments and counter-hegemonic social practices.
This study illustrates the political significance of these artistic practices and critically contributes to the debate on the conditions of utopian thinking in late-capitalist society, arguing that contemporary artists' interest in the past is the result of a shift within the temporal organization of the utopian imagination from its futuristic pole toward remembrance. The book therefore provides one of the first critical examinations of the recent turn toward documentary in the field of contemporary art.
Papers by Paolo Magagnoli
Coercion and Wage Labour: Exploring Labour Relations through History and Art , 2023
Journal of Australian Studies, 2023
Despite its reputation as a frivolous and licentious magazine, Pix (1938–1972) published a large ... more Despite its reputation as a frivolous and licentious magazine, Pix
(1938–1972) published a large number of documentary photo
essays on work and the daily strife of the Australian labourer.
More importantly, the popular magazine promoted a stern work
ethic, presented as a sign of patriotism and moral virtue. Pix’s
politics are hard to pin down insofar as the magazine never
endorsed specific parties or social movements; instead, it adopted
an apparently neutral stance in relation to political issues, giving
equal coverage to the three mainstream parties of the time. If the
national narrative of work that Pix glorified was, fundamentally, a
bipartisan narrative, was Pix really apolitical and value-free? I say
no: the locus of Pix’s politics has to be found in the way the
magazine mobilised the discourse of the work ethic. By reducing
work to a moral obligation, Pix tended to individualise and
normalise waged work, concealing the unequal and coercive
relations informing the social space of the factory. In so doing,
the magazine conveyed and championed values such as
independence and entrepreneurship that were central to the
liberal ideology that found expression in Robert Menzies’s
contemporary speeches.
Photography and Culture, 2020
Spanning five central decades of the mid-twentieth century (1934–1974), Walkabout was one of Aust... more Spanning five central decades of the mid-twentieth century
(1934–1974), Walkabout was one of Australia’s best-loved illustrated
weeklies. Photography played a crucial role in the magazine’s
attempt to represent the vast Australian continent and its neighboring
countries. While historians and critics have regarded the
magazine as an example of boosterish nationalism and middle-brow
anti-intellectualism, I argue that the periodical should be considered
as an amalgam of reactionary and progressive ideals: Walkabout was
a paradoxical combination of high-modernism and romantic anti-capitalism,
conservative nationalism and left populism. Although it
glossed over many of the problems facing the country, the editors’
emphasis on “factual photography” was indicative of a democratic
impulse. I offer an examination of the magazine’s coverage of
extractive projects as an example of Walkabout’s ideological contradictions.
In particular, I look at Laurence Le Guay and Robert
Emerson Curtis’s 1947 photo-essay about the mining town of
Mount Isa to show how the periodical attempted to reconcile two
antagonistic gazes: that of the corporate engineer and that of
the miner.
Magagnoli, Paolo (2018). ‘How Mining Made Australia’: Populist Nostalgia and the Spectre of Climate Change in the Television Documentary Dirty Business. Climate Change and The Media: Vol. 2. Edited by Benedetta Brevini and Justin Lewis. New York, NY United States: Peter Lang., 2018
The article provides an examination of the aesthetics (and politics) of extractivism in Australia... more The article provides an examination of the aesthetics (and politics) of extractivism in Australia through the case study of television documentary Dirty Business (2012).
This article examines Zhao Liang's photographic series Beijing Green (2004–07) and Water (2004–08... more This article examines Zhao Liang's photographic series Beijing Green (2004–07) and Water (2004–08). Both works document environmental degradation in the Chinese capital while making references to the Chinese pictorial tradition: the green and blue hues of Beijing Green are reminiscent of shanshui landscapes, while Water's carefully controlled compositions and highly saturated colours are reminiscent of early twentieth century flowers and birds paintings. The artist is interested in ephemeral sites, where the natural and the artificial are meshed together forming strangely beautiful patterns. His images of Beijing's ecological decay are both stunning and deeply disturbing. Pollution is aestheticized in Beijing Green and Water: a fact that has raised substantial criticism. Art historians have condemned the cultivated political quietude of Zhao's practice. Yet one detects an unmistakable humour in the artist's two photographic series, a tongue-in-cheek intonation, which distances them from the model of activist art but has nonetheless critical and subversive ends. This article suggests that the target of Zhao's subtle irony is the state's discourse around 'ecological civilization' (shengtai wenming) – still prominent today – and the official authorities ubiquitous advertisement campaign calling for the beautification of Beijing launched in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. 14. JCCA_3.3_Magagnoli_367-376
Senses of Cinema no. 74, March 2015
Digital Compression as Revelation in the Art of Sean Snyder fig. 46 | Sean Snyder, Installation s... more Digital Compression as Revelation in the Art of Sean Snyder fig. 46 | Sean Snyder, Installation shot of the exhibition Optics. Compression. Propaganda, 2007, LightJet prints, two videos on monitor and three vitrines with archival material © Sean Snyder. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.
Academic Quarter, Special Issue on the Aesthetics of Human Rights, pp. 89-100, Dec 1, 2012
Afterall, no. 31 , pp. 26-35, Oct 1, 2012
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Philosophy of Photography, Dec 1, 2012
First exhibited in 1999, Jean-Luc Moulène's 24 Objets de Grève is a photographic archive printed ... more First exhibited in 1999, Jean-Luc Moulène's 24 Objets de Grève is a photographic archive printed in a range of different formats, portraying a variety of products made by French workers on strike between the 1970s and the 1990s. These comprise of scarves, T-shirts, dolls, geographical maps, cigarettes, facsimile banknotes, perfume bottles and other items. The objects were aimed at financially supporting the strikers and attracting the solidarity of the general public. Often destroyed after their use, they were not created with the intention of being collected and exhibited as works of art. 24 Objets de Grève lends itself to multiple and seemingly contradictory readings: it can be read as a Rancerian celebration of the creativity of the working class or as its undue appropriation; as a commemoration of the history of the workers movement or as an act of forgetting and reification. This article explores the ambivalences, hiatuses and limitations of Moulène's project in relation to its representational strategies and the notion of emancipatory aesthetic elaborated by Jacques Rancière.
Third Text, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 311-324 , Jun 1, 2011
Oxford Art Journal, pp. 97-121 , Mar 1, 2011
Book Reviews by Paolo Magagnoli
Burlington Contemporary, 2019
Review of the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery-Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane ... more Review of the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery-Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
24th November 2018–28th April 2019
University of Columbia Press/Wallflower, May 12, 2015
This timely volume discusses the experimental documentary projects of some of the most significan... more This timely volume discusses the experimental documentary projects of some of the most significant artists working in the world today: Hito Steyerl, Joachim Koester, Tacita Dean, Matthew Buckingham, Zoe Leonard, Jean-Luc Moulène, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead, and Anri Sala. Their films, videos, and photographic series address failed utopian experiments and counter-hegemonic social practices.
This study illustrates the political significance of these artistic practices and critically contributes to the debate on the conditions of utopian thinking in late-capitalist society, arguing that contemporary artists' interest in the past is the result of a shift within the temporal organization of the utopian imagination from its futuristic pole toward remembrance. The book therefore provides one of the first critical examinations of the recent turn toward documentary in the field of contemporary art.
Coercion and Wage Labour: Exploring Labour Relations through History and Art , 2023
Journal of Australian Studies, 2023
Despite its reputation as a frivolous and licentious magazine, Pix (1938–1972) published a large ... more Despite its reputation as a frivolous and licentious magazine, Pix
(1938–1972) published a large number of documentary photo
essays on work and the daily strife of the Australian labourer.
More importantly, the popular magazine promoted a stern work
ethic, presented as a sign of patriotism and moral virtue. Pix’s
politics are hard to pin down insofar as the magazine never
endorsed specific parties or social movements; instead, it adopted
an apparently neutral stance in relation to political issues, giving
equal coverage to the three mainstream parties of the time. If the
national narrative of work that Pix glorified was, fundamentally, a
bipartisan narrative, was Pix really apolitical and value-free? I say
no: the locus of Pix’s politics has to be found in the way the
magazine mobilised the discourse of the work ethic. By reducing
work to a moral obligation, Pix tended to individualise and
normalise waged work, concealing the unequal and coercive
relations informing the social space of the factory. In so doing,
the magazine conveyed and championed values such as
independence and entrepreneurship that were central to the
liberal ideology that found expression in Robert Menzies’s
contemporary speeches.
Photography and Culture, 2020
Spanning five central decades of the mid-twentieth century (1934–1974), Walkabout was one of Aust... more Spanning five central decades of the mid-twentieth century
(1934–1974), Walkabout was one of Australia’s best-loved illustrated
weeklies. Photography played a crucial role in the magazine’s
attempt to represent the vast Australian continent and its neighboring
countries. While historians and critics have regarded the
magazine as an example of boosterish nationalism and middle-brow
anti-intellectualism, I argue that the periodical should be considered
as an amalgam of reactionary and progressive ideals: Walkabout was
a paradoxical combination of high-modernism and romantic anti-capitalism,
conservative nationalism and left populism. Although it
glossed over many of the problems facing the country, the editors’
emphasis on “factual photography” was indicative of a democratic
impulse. I offer an examination of the magazine’s coverage of
extractive projects as an example of Walkabout’s ideological contradictions.
In particular, I look at Laurence Le Guay and Robert
Emerson Curtis’s 1947 photo-essay about the mining town of
Mount Isa to show how the periodical attempted to reconcile two
antagonistic gazes: that of the corporate engineer and that of
the miner.
Magagnoli, Paolo (2018). ‘How Mining Made Australia’: Populist Nostalgia and the Spectre of Climate Change in the Television Documentary Dirty Business. Climate Change and The Media: Vol. 2. Edited by Benedetta Brevini and Justin Lewis. New York, NY United States: Peter Lang., 2018
The article provides an examination of the aesthetics (and politics) of extractivism in Australia... more The article provides an examination of the aesthetics (and politics) of extractivism in Australia through the case study of television documentary Dirty Business (2012).
This article examines Zhao Liang's photographic series Beijing Green (2004–07) and Water (2004–08... more This article examines Zhao Liang's photographic series Beijing Green (2004–07) and Water (2004–08). Both works document environmental degradation in the Chinese capital while making references to the Chinese pictorial tradition: the green and blue hues of Beijing Green are reminiscent of shanshui landscapes, while Water's carefully controlled compositions and highly saturated colours are reminiscent of early twentieth century flowers and birds paintings. The artist is interested in ephemeral sites, where the natural and the artificial are meshed together forming strangely beautiful patterns. His images of Beijing's ecological decay are both stunning and deeply disturbing. Pollution is aestheticized in Beijing Green and Water: a fact that has raised substantial criticism. Art historians have condemned the cultivated political quietude of Zhao's practice. Yet one detects an unmistakable humour in the artist's two photographic series, a tongue-in-cheek intonation, which distances them from the model of activist art but has nonetheless critical and subversive ends. This article suggests that the target of Zhao's subtle irony is the state's discourse around 'ecological civilization' (shengtai wenming) – still prominent today – and the official authorities ubiquitous advertisement campaign calling for the beautification of Beijing launched in preparation for the 2008 Olympics. 14. JCCA_3.3_Magagnoli_367-376
Senses of Cinema no. 74, March 2015
Digital Compression as Revelation in the Art of Sean Snyder fig. 46 | Sean Snyder, Installation s... more Digital Compression as Revelation in the Art of Sean Snyder fig. 46 | Sean Snyder, Installation shot of the exhibition Optics. Compression. Propaganda, 2007, LightJet prints, two videos on monitor and three vitrines with archival material © Sean Snyder. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery, London.
Academic Quarter, Special Issue on the Aesthetics of Human Rights, pp. 89-100, Dec 1, 2012
Afterall, no. 31 , pp. 26-35, Oct 1, 2012
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Philosophy of Photography, Dec 1, 2012
First exhibited in 1999, Jean-Luc Moulène's 24 Objets de Grève is a photographic archive printed ... more First exhibited in 1999, Jean-Luc Moulène's 24 Objets de Grève is a photographic archive printed in a range of different formats, portraying a variety of products made by French workers on strike between the 1970s and the 1990s. These comprise of scarves, T-shirts, dolls, geographical maps, cigarettes, facsimile banknotes, perfume bottles and other items. The objects were aimed at financially supporting the strikers and attracting the solidarity of the general public. Often destroyed after their use, they were not created with the intention of being collected and exhibited as works of art. 24 Objets de Grève lends itself to multiple and seemingly contradictory readings: it can be read as a Rancerian celebration of the creativity of the working class or as its undue appropriation; as a commemoration of the history of the workers movement or as an act of forgetting and reification. This article explores the ambivalences, hiatuses and limitations of Moulène's project in relation to its representational strategies and the notion of emancipatory aesthetic elaborated by Jacques Rancière.
Third Text, vol. 25, no. 3, pp. 311-324 , Jun 1, 2011
Oxford Art Journal, pp. 97-121 , Mar 1, 2011
Burlington Contemporary, 2019
Review of the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery-Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane ... more Review of the 9th Asia Pacific Triennial, Queensland Art Gallery-Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane
24th November 2018–28th April 2019