Curtin University Homepage
  • Library
  • Help
    • Admin

    espace - Curtin’s institutional repository

    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.
    View Item 
    • espace Home
    • espace
    • Curtin Research Publications
    • View Item
    • espace Home
    • espace
    • Curtin Research Publications
    • View Item

    Impossible Empathy: The Non-Documentary War Art of Shaun Gladwell

    Access Status
    Fulltext not available
    Authors
    Messham-Muir, Kit
    Date
    2014
    Type
    Journal Article
    
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Citation
    Messham-Muir, C.D. 2014. Impossible Empathy: The Non-Documentary War Art of Shaun Gladwell. ON: Audio Journal for Experimental Art and Visual Culture. 1 (1).
    Source Title
    ON: Audio Journal for Experimental Art and Visual Culture
    Faculty
    Faculty of Humanities
    School
    School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry
    URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11937/80786
    Collection
    • Curtin Research Publications
    Abstract

    Shaun Gladwell is an Australian video installation artist whose practice is concerned with the bodily gesture and motion. In 2009, Gladwell was appointed an Official War Artist by the Australian War Memorial, and was sent to Afghanistan and the Middle East to create a body of work about the frontline experiences of Australian Defence Force personnel. This article examines the particular approach of Gladwell’s Official War Artist works. Other contemporary Australian artists dealing with war, such as Ben Quilty, George Gittoes and Wendy Sharp, tend to adopt a subjective documentary approach to war’s narratives of trauma, concentrating on weighty themes such as death, loss, and post-traumatic stress. In contrast,Gladwell’s war art actively resists both subjectivity and documentary. Unlike Quilty’s “humanist approach”, Gladwell avoids the political and emotional baggage inherent in images of war. Drawing from theorists Charles Green, Nicholas Croggon and Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, who argue that Gladwell’s video works actively resist the narrative tendencies of the moving image, this paper suggests that Gladwell consciously resists the documentary inclinations of photographic and video media. His work also avoids narrative and, ultimately, resists articulating any subjective positionality, either his own or that of the soldiers he portrays.

    Related items

    Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

    • Shaun Gladwell on ’Self-Portrait as a Semiotext(e) Foreign Agent’, London, 3 February 2015
      Messham-Muir, Kit (2015)
      For his exhibition The Lacrima Chair at Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (6 March-25 April 2015), Shaun Gladwell produced a body of works that included an artwork-book, titled ’Self-Portrait as a Semiotext(e) Foreign ...
    • Double War: Shaun Gladwell, visual culture and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq
      Messham-Muir, Christian (2015)
      This book focuses on art and war and, in particular, the photographs of Shaun Gladwell, an internationally acclaimed young Australian artist who has represented Australia at a Venice Biennale and has also served as an ...
    • Two artists go to war – Shaun Gladwell and Ben Quilty
      Messham-Muir, Kit (2014)
      Shaun Gladwell and Ben Quilty – two of Australia’s leading artists – display very different approaches to war at parallel exhibitions opening at Perth’s John Curtin Gallery on Saturday 2 August 2014. Gladwell is Australia’s ...
    Advanced search

    Browse

    Communities & CollectionsIssue DateAuthorTitleSubjectDocument TypeThis CollectionIssue DateAuthorTitleSubjectDocument Type

    My Account

    Admin

    Statistics

    Most Popular ItemsStatistics by CountryMost Popular Authors

    Follow Curtin

    • 
    • 
    • 
    • 
    • 

    CRICOS Provider Code: 00301JABN: 99 143 842 569TEQSA: PRV12158

    Copyright | Disclaimer | Privacy statement | Accessibility

    Curtin would like to pay respect to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander members of our community by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which the Perth campus is located, the Whadjuk people of the Nyungar Nation; and on our Kalgoorlie campus, the Wongutha people of the North-Eastern Goldfields.