Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemTacking: a tacktical methodology for making art( 2021)This is a thesis-only practice-led PhD that presents the practice of tacking and the “tacktical methodology” that emerges out of it as my original contribution to knowledge. Tacking is a way of practising string figures differently, that is by practising them between two people, not passing one figure on to the other as in a cat’s cradle, but with one person using their left hand and the other person using their right hand. By drawing on the range of meanings of the word ‘tacking’ and its etymological relations and friends: ‘tacky’, ‘tack’, ‘tactic’, and ‘tact,’ I have constructed a tacktical methodology for thinking about and doing art differently. The inquiry that resulted in tacking and a tacktical methodology was one around race and privilege. As a contemporary artist I wanted to find a way of making contemporary art that did not reinforce or reproduce the status of privilege that automatically came with being a white, female artist in Naarm/Melbourne. The inquiry involved questioning contemporary art itself, the history it comes out of, who defines it and whose work is used to exemplify it. I find that contemporary art is already so steeped in a white and patriarchal paradigm it is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how it could be otherwise. Tacking and a tacktical methodology are not contemporary art. They offer an alternative way of practising and thinking about art so that systems that sustain whiteness and patriarchy are not reproduced. To arrive at tacking and a tacktical methodology as a solution to the problem I posed myself I learned from paradigms that were different to the white, patriarchal paradigm of contemporary art. Specifically I learned from Indigenous and feminist philosophies of relationality and from other related philosophies that showed me how putting relation at the centre of a practice can diminish imbalanced power relations. Relation is both the material and the outcome of a tacktical methodology. A tacktical methodology maintains an oblique relationship to power. It is a way of moving against powerful forces and a way of bringing things—ideas, people, animals, anything—together.