Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemSpace is occurring( 2019)SPACE IS OCCURRING is a research project comprised of twelve public exhibitions spanning 2016-2019, including an examination exhibition presentation at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery from 5-16 December 2019, and a written dissertation. In this MFA, assessment is divided as: 75% creative practice and 25% written dissertation. The four-year research project has investigated attentiveness, and negotiations of attentiveness, within contexts that situate, exhibit, display, frame or present contemporary art. Professional opportunities to actualise exhibition works have been taken as resources for doing/thinking research. This set of exhibition works is understood as concurrent research and outcome: artistic decision-making systems, conceptual working questions and professional or ethical mitigations converge and overlap during this doing/thinking. The vocational context of exhibiting within existing visual arts institutions has been the main resource to apply and test research concerns. In addressing this methodology of doing/thinking in the dynamic in situ realm, the written dissertation proposes the concept of ‘infield’. The term ‘infield’, borrowed from its sporting context, is repurposed as means for understanding each specific exhibition context as a dynamic location that is always in an active state of play. The research draws from an engagement with Bulgarian/French philosopher Julia Kristeva’s theories of ‘semiotic chora’ and ‘in-progress time’. These concepts support an engagement with the time-space of exhibitions as happening in motion, continuously beginning anew. The relation and interrelation of temporal and spatial experience within systems for making and experiencing art is the focus for an investigation into the writings of theorists including Andre Lepecki, as well as the practices of contemporary artists who work across at least two of the following: sculpture, sound, choreography and/or film. Specific works from artists John Cage, Simone Forti, Marco Fusinato, Douglas Gordon, Robert Morris, Ute Muller, Steve Paxton, Geoff Robinson and Daniel von Sturmer are included in this investigation into artistic strategies within this field. Exhibition works are developed and refined as projects that operate as systems for the spatial and temporal conditions and materials of each exhibition context. Within works, sculptural and filmic means are orchestrated as fields of interactions, and interferences, scored within the spatial and temporal conditions of exhibition context. Fixity and stasis – taken as a lingering museological construct of gallery spaces – are approached as problems to be disrupted, made evident, or a combination thereof. Often specific spatiotemporal overlay procedures develop, which may then be transferred upon (and reinformed by) subsequent professional exhibition opportunities, for different institutions. The application and potential reapplication of exhibition work systems – for different exhibition outcomes at different times – has allowed for a comparative analysis of the manner in which these operate with and within the contingencies of each specific exhibition context.
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ItemFoolish Painterly Conundrums( 2019)Foolish Painterly Conundrums is powered by the idea of foolishness both in its approach and as a conceptual inference within the production of paintings. This dissertation explores the notion of Foolishly Camp by fusing together historical ideas associated with that of The Fool with those of the frivolous and excessive nature of Camp. Through Foolishly Camp, this writing unpacks the allusions to playfully and willfully negotiating hierarchies of taste and structures within painting. The constraints of this medium is viewed as pigment applied to a flat substrate utilising marks, forms, colour combinations, tonal gradations and representation. Alongside the production of paintings in the studio and the examination of painting in the written dissertation, two key relationships have emerged: the relationship between materiality and image and, that of the figure and ground. The works made in the studio comprise of 75% of the project whilst this written dissertation comprises 25% of the overall research, it is the studio work which is paintings, drawings and sketches which has led this written dissertation. Through the examination of artists such as Laura Owens and Katherine Bernhardt, this writing approaches how printed reproductions on the internet, video games, and seemingly Camp films have influenced the practice of painting. The idea of artifice is explored in relation to an urban cultural context influenced by the internet, and colour. More specifically, these ideas are explored in three chapters: Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion (Camp), Super Paper Mario (artifice) and, Call me by your Name (painterly conundrums). Foolish Painterly Conundrums is an exploration of painting through its mediations; scrolling images, video games, film and the experience of viewing and making paintings. This dissertation charts a trajectory of painting which is playful and speculative as this painter stumbles, wobbles and fumbles his way towards a new suite of paintings.
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ItemPerforming algorithms: Automation and accident( 2019)"Performing Algorithms: Automation and Accident" investigates how artists might stage encounters with the algorithms driving our post-industrial, big-data-based, automatic society. Several important theories of this contemporary condition are discussed, including control societies, post-industrial societies, the automatic society, the cybernetic hypothesis, and algorithmic governmentality. These concepts are interwoven with histories of labour and automation, recent developments in machine learning and neural networks, and my own past work. Through a series of expanded lecture performances that describe our algorithmic condition while setting it into motion, this research seeks to discover ways in which to advance new critical positions within a totalizing technical apparatus whose very design preempts it. The included creative works have been performed, exhibited, and published between 2014 and 2018. They are made available online through an artificially intelligent chatbot, a frequent figure in the research, which here extends the concerns of that research through to how the work is framed and presented. The thesis focuses on both generative art and the lecture performance, which converge in performing algorithms but are generally not discussed in connection with one another. They emerged in parallel as artistic methods, however, at a time when management and computation were taking root in the workplace in the 1960s. Furthermore, as the Internet became widespread from the 1990s, generative art and the lecture performance each found renewed prominence. With human language and gesture increasingly modelling itself on the language of computation and work constantly reshaped by the innovations of capital, this project identifies “not working” both in terms of the technological breakdown and also as a condition of labour under automation. A discussion of the first fatal accident involving a self-driving vehicle illustrates this dual condition. Shifting from glitch art’s preoccupation with provoking errors to a consideration of not working, this research proposes artistic strategies that learn to occupy rather than display the accident.