With substantial scientific, ethnohistoric, and iconographic evidence, I show that Late Postclassic (ca. I relate this scientific information to my analysis of plant imagery in Aztec art. parviglumis) and created the maize (corn) plant (Zea mays L.). Japan’s alternative designs are not winning over the hearts of the Australian people.īiologists and archaeologists report that approximately 8,000 years ago, Central Mexicans began genetically manipulating a common grass known in the scientific literature as teosinte (Zea mays ssp. Japanese fashion is only attractive because it is different. However, the interview findings from Australian participants reveal that they do not necessarily find Japanese fashion better than that from other countries. To a degree, this evidence is also supported by qualitative interviews I conducted both in Australia and Japan with professionals in the world of fashion, including designers, journalists and retailers. My analysis of Australian fashion magazines suggests that Japanese fashion items are well accepted by Australians. Japanese fashion designers are well-known for challenging the established Western discourse of fashion, for example, by avoiding vivid colours, employing new synthetic materials such as polyester and applying traditional Japanese folding techniques as seen in the kimono and origami to present modern two-dimensional designs. Australia is even home to Akira Isogawa, the Kyoto-native designer, who was chosen as one of the six best Australian fashion designers at the 2005 Australian Legends stamps collection. Australia is not the most fashion-conscious country, due to its laid-back culture and its distance from international fashion capitals such as Paris and New York, but by the early 00s, as Yuniya Kawamura notes, Japanese fashion is shown in a positive light in Australian boutiques. Since the international debut of the ‘big three’ Japanese fashion designers, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, almost 40 years ago, Japanese fashion has established its strong presence in the global fashion arena. However, the magazines documented in this thesis represented a continuing strong desire for critical dialogue despite the ongoing and emerging challenges for independent criticism. Between 19 many of the forms of crisis experienced by independent critical projects in Melbourne were exacerbated, reflecting the diminished position criticism had come to hold both in terms of financial value and discursive relevance. Paradoxically, the real crises found to beset the magazines reviewed here at once undermined and encouraged further critical responses. In doing so, this thesis demonstrates that a notion of ‘crisis’, and the belief that art criticism is suffering a crisis, has dominated recent discourse regarding the genre. The complex layers of conditions motivating these shifts in criticism were found to encompass pragmatic and financial constraints, as well as a wider crisis concerning audience and accessibility for both art and criticism. Through interviews, archival research and analysis of the content and structure of the magazines themselves, this research contributes to a local history of criticism and the discussion of its shifting and unsettled position in the contemporary Australian art world. Building on three key case studies - the magazines Agenda / LIKE, Artfan and un Magazine - the thesis traces the motivations driving independent critical projects, and the editorial priorities, strategies and values with which these were articulated. This MA thesis (University of Melbourne, 2009) is a study of independent art criticism and magazine publishing in Melbourne during the period of 1988 to 2006.
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