[csaa-forum] [iaspm-anz] Sydney seminar 21st July

[Tony Mitchell]

Just a reminder about Friday's seminar

Living large: the field recording, the mug shot and the early 20th 
century mediascape

Peter Doyle
Macquarie University

UTS Bon Marche 3/210
Friday 21st July 5.30pm

In the 1920s and 1930s, US record companies conducted a program of 
field trips to city bars, juke joints and to the rural south, seeking 
hitherto unrecorded talent to release on budget-priced records for 
local distribution. This project happened to coincide with the coming 
of electrical recording and playback, and also, roughly, with the 
arrival of broadcast radio. At about the same time, across the globe, 
police in  Sydney, Australia compiled a photographic record of the 
city’s everyday thieves, con artists, pickpockets, thugs and cocaine 
sniffers. Surprisingly similar power imbalances prevailed in these very 
different ‘vital’ recording enterprises: in both, declasse, disdained 
outsiders placed themselves, or were placed before apparati manned by 
the representatives of generally uncaring or hostile remote agencies. 
Yet these sound recordings and photographic images often convey a 
restless, idiosyncratic, vigorously-asserted and surprisingly 
modern-seeming selfhood.

  Both products today enjoy a prestige unthinkable at the time of their 
manufacture: early hillbilly and race recordings are canonical items in 
cultural histories of the twentieth century, and it could be argued 
that they comprise the single most direct ancestor of later twentieth 
century rock'n'roll, rock and pop. The long lost Sydney police mug shot 
negatives have recently become, via a museum exhibition and a high 
production-value art book, boutique heritage artifacts.

  Are the rhymes between these disparate works merely accidental? Or can 
they be understood as instances of a broad global demoticism which 
followed World War One, expressed across a variety of then new media 
(including Hollywood cinema, broadcast radio, Soviet agit-prop, 
Kino-Pravda, John Grierson documentary films, pulp and “hardboiled” 
publishing) in which vernacular subjectivities were ‘amplified’ into a 
kind of everyday extraordinary. Might early field recordings and the  
Sydney mugshots be further likened to one another, and separated from 
those other media for the ways in which they so intimately register the 
dispositions of troubled, restless bodies in space, and thus 
simultaneously record and aestheticise both the broader politics and in 
some cases the specific micro-dramas surrounding their manufacture?

Dr. Tony Mitchell
Senior lecturer
Writing & Cultural Studies
Humanities & Social Sciences
UTS
P.O.Box 123 Broadway
NSW 2007
Australia
Tel. 61-2-95142335
Fax 61-2-95142778
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