Seeing Differently: From Antonioni's Blow Up (1966) to Shezad Dawood's Make It Big (2005)

Abstract

This article makes use of London-based artist Shezad Dawood's 2005 reworking of Antonioni's 1966 Blow Up in his photographic and installation work Make It Big to explore a shifting regime of vision and power in Euro-American culture between the 1960s and the present. Via an analysis and comparison of the terms of vision and knowing in Blow Up and Make It Big, the author argues that Dawood's project articulates a subject that is newly hybrid and networked. Working postcolonial theory against new media theory, the article also puts pressure on the tendency in debates about new media to attribute all shifts in contemporary experience to the advent of the digital, arguing that these debates fail to acknowledge fully the crucial importance of broad social and political shifts since the Second World War, such as the migration of people across borders, transformations in concepts of identity and belonging, and changes in the way intellectual, aesthetic and financial capital circulates.

Keywords

cinema modernism new media photography postcolonial theory subjectivity vision

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bhabha, Homi (1995) Location of Culture. London : Routledge.

Dawood, Shezad (2004) `Beyond Difference' , Spiked-Culture (16 March). URL (consulted 12 Sept. 2007): http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA476.htm

Dawood, Shezad (2005) Press Release for Make It Big/Paradise Row exhibition .

Dawood, Shezad (2007) Dialogue with Amelia Jones (18 January) in London ; a version of this will be published by Routledge in Amelia Jones and Adrian Heathfield (eds) (forthcoming) Perform, Repeat, Record: Live Art in History.

Di Palma, Carlo and Szklarski, Stephen J. (2001) `Carlo Di Palma: An Interview by Stephen J. Szklarski' , Independent Film Quarterly 1 , Fall). URL (consulted 23 Nov. 2007): http://www.independentfilmquarterly.com/ifq/issues/issue2/carlodipalma.htm

Foucault, Michel (1977[1969]) `What Is an Author?', in Donald Bouchard (ed.) Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Gardner, Colin (2002) `Antonioni's Blow Up and the Chiasmus of Memory' , Artbrain (10 June). URL (consulted 12 Sept. 2007): http://artbrain.org/journal2/gardner.html

Hammond, Chris (2005) `Take the Tour', in Paradise Row, brochure to accompany Shezad Dawood's exhibition, 16 May-10 July.

10.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

11.

Heidegger, Martin (1977[1938]) `The Age of the World Picture', in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. New York: Harper & Row.

12.

Lacan, Jacques (1981[1964]) `What is a Picture?', in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: W.W. Norton.

13.

Le Feuvre, Lisa (2005) `Estate Agents Start from the Top', in Paradise Row, brochure to accompany Shezad Dawood's exhibition , 16 May-10 July.

14.

Marks, Laura U. (2002) Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

15.

Mulvey, Laura (1975) `Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', in Amelia Jones (ed.) Feminism and Visual Culture Reader. New York: Routledge.

16.

Neidich, Warren (2005) `Blow Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain', in Warren Neidich et al. (eds) Blow Up: Photography, Cinema, and the Brain. Riverside, CA: California Museum of Photography/ New York: D.A.P.

17.

Silverman, Kaja (1996) `The Gaze', The Threshold of the Visible World . New York: Routledge.