Lip and Love: subversive repetition in the pastiche films of Tracey Moffatt

Abstract

Moving image art since the 1990s has often expressed a fascination with classical Hollywood cinema, employing strategies that range from allusion to direct quotation in its attempts to revise Hollywood imagery, forms and conventions, and the values that these enshrine.1 Such promiscuous practices of regurgitation are often characterized as parasitical and purely derivative, expressive of a late capitalist cynicism that permeates every aspect of culture; a characterization, in fact, largely attributable to the influential theories of Fredric Jameson.2 This diagnosis of appropriation practices in contemporary culture as relatively impotent and indicating the impossibility of innovation has proved hugely influential, overshadowing discussions of their capacity to critique the forms and images they invoke. The cinematic text is resituated in a variety of ways in contemporary art, but rather than viewing this as a simple gesture of imitation for its own sake or for nostalgic purposes, I shall suggest that cinema is hereby subjected to what theorist Linda Hutcheon terms a ‘complicitous critique’.3 For, while parodic reframings do carry with them many of the conventions and values of the original text, they do so only as a prerequisite for critique.

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