The Ekphrasis Engine: Towards a New Industry Architecture for Digital Art Historical Practice in the Age of the Virtual

Abstract

In 1956, Sidney Nolan spent a day exploring the Gallipoli peninsula. Though brief, the experience crystallised in him the historical significance of the Dardanelles. 'I stood on the place where the first ANZACs had stood,' he later recalled, 'looked across the straits to the site of ancient Troy, and felt that here history had stood still.' 1 At the time Nolan had been reading Homer's Iliad, and was wrestling with how to reconstruct the grand, heroic narratives of classical mythology for a new time and a new place. On the shores of Gallipoli, where Australian troops had themselves reprised the campaigns of Xerxes and Agamemnon, he found inspiration. In the dense void of Nolan's The Galaxy (1957-58) (Figure 1)-one of the earlier paintings from the Gallipoli series he began in the mid-1950s and pursued for two decades-we see a pastiche of historical and aesthetic reflections on war and its aftermath. Looking at the ethereal forms of naked Australian soldiers drifting rhythmically across the surface of the painting, we are gripped by the melancholy with which Nolan looked back on the tragedy of the First World War. But the image also speaks of contemporary anxieties. The eddies and swirls that animate the work were intended by Nolan to evoke the interior of an atom, a potent symbol of force and fear in a postwar world haunted by the spectres of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And yet the anxieties may have also been deeply personal: Nolan's brother Raymond had drowned while on service shortly before the end of the Second World War. Nolan's confidante, Patrick White, who believed the work was proof that Nolan was Australia's greatest creative painter, read it best. Drawing back from the microscopic lens towards the telescopic, he read the swirls as the Milky Way set against a limitless blackness that had enveloped the events at Gallipoli under the auspices of a shared narrative of human history. In this sense, above all else, Galaxy offers one great gift to its viewer: perspective. A century after Nolan painted The Galaxy, the turbulent subatomic physics he depicted provide a new and unexpected orbit from which to map the artist's autobiographical ambiguities. As detailed by Paula Dredge et al. in the essay that opens this issue, 'Unmasking Sidney Nolan's Ned Kelly: X-ray Fluorescence