The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
And the Prophet said, ‘And lo, the beast looked upon the face of beauty. And it stayed its hand from killing. And from that day, it was as one dead’.
(opening title card from King Kong, 1931)
When the new Queensland Gallery of Modern Art (QGMA) opens in late 2006, a significant part of this new institution, with its two cinema spaces and exhibition gallery, will be the Australian Cinémathèque: the first Australian art museum to have purpose-built facilities dedicated to film and the moving image. The exhibition, ‘Kiss of the Beast’, comprising a visual art exhibition curated by Ted Gott, and a ten day film program curated by Kathryn Weir, was the premiere program of the Cinémathèque.
Held over the summer holiday season at the Queensland Art Gallery and Southbank Cinemas, Kiss of the Beast simultaneously looked forward to the exciting future of the new QGMA, and back over the richly complex history of the figure of the ‘beast’ across the history of art. The film program made a determined, and very timely link between the ‘low’ or popular art of cinema, and gallery or museum ‘fine’ art. The show served two purposes: it introduced audiences to the Cinémathèque and its interconnected aesthetic, social and pedagogical roles; and underlined the relationship between film in the cinema and visual art in the gallery setting.
Kiss of the Beast revolved around a single, iconic image—the fragile body of a woman trapped in the beast’s clutches. Emmanuel Frémiet’s remarkable bronze sculpture Gorilla Carrying Off a Woman (1887) was the aesthetic fountainhead for a multifaceted exploration of representations and permutations of ‘the beast’, in various relations with ‘the beauty’.
The... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline