Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemIncarna : investigating spatial realisation in choreography(University of Melbourne, 2006)
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ItemNo Preview AvailablePoverty and the work of art( 2023-05)This research is a speculative investigation through artwork and parallel text into how notions of poverty as virtue play out in art practice. It begins from the premise that there is an age-old affinity between poverty and art that is akin to that between poverty and religion, and poverty and philosophy. The thesis centers on the interpretation of poverty in the Franciscan tradition, from which perspective it considers its treatment in medieval allegories, Giotto’s frescoes, and arte povera. It contemplates the place of poverty in the ancient wheel of fortune, in the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, in Stoicism, in the Garden of Eden, in the films of Robert Bresson, in the thinking of Heidegger, trying always to uncover the underlying reason or reasons as to why and how a negative condition can be turned into a positive. It looks into the Christian idea of poverty of spirit and seeks its equivalent in art practice. Drawing on insights from philosophers Jacques Maritain, Giorgio Agamben, the Stoics, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil, and others, the written research builds up a paradigm for understanding the inner poverty upon which the creative process may depend. The practical component of the research is made up of 37 individual paintings which were exhibited under the title ‘The Wind Blows Where It Will’ (Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne 13 March – 17 April 2021). The centre piece of the exhibition is a series of 14 allegorical and narrative images, sparely painted on raw linen panels, which incorporate traditional and art historical references into original imagery to create a revision of the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy, the antiquated codex of Christian charity. The variety of possible scenarios enabled within this framework permit a nuanced exploration of the meanings of poverty that extend into paradox and irony. These and the remaining paintings, which include 5 stand-alone works, 3 triptychs and a constellation of 9 fragmented images on hessian, all use sparse and restricted artistic means which correspond with the ideas and arguments discussed in the thesis. In imagery, content, and materiality the artworks give form and substance to the ambiguous metaphors of poverty and poverty of spirit. Each side of the research goes where the other cannot reach to find a new understanding of poverty as a fundamental principle in the work of art. Documentation of the artwork is submitted with the thesis.
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ItemAn Art-Based Inquiry Into Participants' Experiences of Individually-Tailored Brief Online Art Therapy With Young Adults Who Experienced Challenging Life Events( 2023-02)This thesis presents a research project exploring how 15 young adults made meaning of an individually tailored brief online art therapy program. This project took place in an Australian university during the global pandemic, with participants self-identifying as having challenging life experiences. Universities are considered an environment promoting young adults’ self-exploration and identity and skills development (Gutierrez & Park, 2015). Importantly, the significance of the university environment in influencing student mental health and wellbeing is recognised (Baik et al., 2017, p. 5). Among numerous protective factors that promote student mental health and wellbeing, Baik et al. (2017) identify an integrated sense of self, a sense of belonging, supportive interpersonal relationships, and experiencing self-efficacy as positive psychological resources (Baik et al., 2017). Nevertheless, the university environment remains an under-explored practice and research context for art therapists (Sonnone & Rochford, 2020). Considering young adults are characterised as self-motivated and creative individuals open to exploring novel, stimulating and playful activities (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996) and experiencing shifting identity and value formation (Harris et al., 2015), there are exciting possibilities for investigating the potential for integrating art therapy with student and other youth services to offer guided opportunities for their creative self-exploration and personal resource development. This project aimed to respond to this opportunity by exploring young adults’ experiences of the art therapy program that was designed to tailor to their various motivations and needs and promote their self-agentic use of the program (Schwan et al., 2018). This emergent research was designed as an art-based grounded theory study where 14 university students and one young adult participated in up to six art therapy sessions across 6 to 12 weeks and described their experiences in a post-program interview. Making and viewing art was actively integrated with generating data by participants and researcher (McNiff, 2008), while Strauss and Corbin’s (1990) approach to grounded theory was principally applied to the procedural steps in data analysis. A theoretical understanding resulting from this study, conceptualised as co-exploration, elucidated the young adults’ key motivation for and meaning of engaging with art therapy, mapped the actions and interactions of young adults and art therapist and illuminated the conditions conducive to and constraining young adults’ creative self-exploration. In particular, the analysis revealed the compatibility between young adults’ high motivation for self-growth and the features of art therapy that could facilitate the creative, relational and emotional processes promoting self-discoveries, new skills development and self-care. Moreover, participants indicated that their preferred style of engagement was to co-navigate the therapy process to support their expression of self-agency and autonomy within the art therapy program. Additionally, they identified the positive impacts of the art therapy program, which were conceptualised in this study as their enriched self-understanding, self-compassion and self-efficacy. As would be expected with a diverse group of young adults, the significance of these impacts varied among the participants, depending on their pertinence to the participants’ current life situations. This study illuminated young adults’ interest in creative activities and desire for growth and self-care-promoting activities. Specifically, it contextualises their various motivations for participating in brief online individual art therapy within their identity as young adults who are university students and their experiences of challenging life events. The program’s features aligning with the participants’ agentic and creative engagement in self-exploration, leading to self-enrichment, offered key insights. These learnings have important implications for broadening the landscape for youth and student-centred wellbeing and mental health programs. From the participants’ perspectives, practice implications suggest that program design and facilitation should actively involve collaboration with motivated young adults seeking opportunities to nurture their creativity, wellbeing and self-understanding. Offering comprehensive information about therapy modalities and incorporating flexible program designs that can adapt to young adults’ evolving interests and needs are foregrounded for engagement. Furthermore, this study highlights young adults’ preferences for therapy encounters that are characterised as the accessibility of the programs, flexibility in decision-making within the program and diverse methods and modalities for self-expression and interaction with the therapist. These insights hold the potential to enhance young adults’ engagement and the positive impacts of services, promoting their wellbeing and mental health (Watsford & Rickwood, 2015).
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ItemDancing the Mimetic Faculty: A Peculiar Phenomenology( 2022-12)This creative research in cine-choreographic practice responds to Walter Benjamin’s (1933) concept the ‘mimetic faculty’ and informs the accompanying creative work, Mimeisthai, a folio of two screendance films. The terms ‘cine-choreographic’ and ‘screendance’ are attributed to scholars Erin Brannigan (2011) and Douglas Rosenberg (2012) respectively, and situate this research within a creative field of dance for screen. The ‘mimetic faculty’ is German philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin’s (b.1892 – d.1940) term for a general ability to reproduce and/or perceive similarity; and therefore, implicitly, includes the ability to perceive difference. This generic skill is possessed by all living things and finds expression on various levels, from the biological to the behavioral; such as in reproduction or camouflage, to the myriad ways that creatures communicate. In humans, specifically, Benjamin suggests the mimetic faculty is responsible for the formation of language (1933/1999b). In the context of this research, the way that bodily gesture can be perceived and transferred from one person to another, in both live and mediated forms, is explored and articulated in relation to Benjamin’s mimetic faculty. This has led to concepts of ‘interpersonal synchrony’ and ‘mirroring’ in neuro-phenomenological studies, ‘performance generating systems’ after Danish Canadian dance theorist Pil Hansen (2014, 2022) and philosopher Brian Massumi’s phenomenological understanding of movement perception and transference as ‘species of movement feeling’ (2011). Benjamin separates similarity into two categories, the ‘sensuous’ and the ‘non-sensuous'. The first being clearly perceivable by the senses, and the second being abstracted from direct perception and often only subconsciously perceived, if at all. This research suggests that the inter-corporeal transfer of movement within choreographic practices can be understood in terms of the mimetic faculty, and that a dancer’s ability to perceive and reproduce ‘species of movement feeling’ indicates an apprehension and embodiment of both ‘sensuous’ and ‘non-sensuous similarity’. There are voluntary and involuntary modes of incorporating the behaviour and gestures of others, both within dance practice and in daily life. Beneath this there is also lived experience of moving that is marked by the materiality of individual anatomy and history, that produces personal signatures of moving which blend and combine with cultural influence. This research argues for a certain creative approach to dance within cine- choreographic filmmaking that engages intentionally with the mimetic faculty, but also acknowledges that the mimetic faculty is always already at play in the performative construction of culture. Dance may be considered pre-verbal expression on one hand, or an expanded form of language/writing on the other, but this research suggests that both language and dance may be seen as interrelated but also entirely separate manifestations of the mimetic faculty and mimetic play.
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ItemWalking with Ghosts: The Utility of Independence in Painting( 2022-12)This research project comprises two creative components and the written dissertation. The creative components are a series of new paintings and their exhibition, titled Walking with Ghosts, held at VCA Artspace in June 2022, and the book titled Walking with Ghosts: Six Conversations about Painting. John Spiteri, Boedi Widjaja and Audrey Koh, Christoph Preussmann, Noor Mahnun Mohamed, Moya McKenna, David Jolly. Talking with Jonathan Nichols, published in 2022. The research responds to a lacuna in contemporary painting: while much has happened in recent decades, in critical debate painting is still perceived as somewhat delinquent and bound-up with subject theory. In response to this dilemma, I deploy the notion of independence as a means to interrogate painting at a structural level (via its framework and exteriority) and at its painted surface (the interior of painting), to re-establish its basis and learning. I argue that the idea of a painter working independently is built into its very fabric and I examine how a painter’s knowledge and experience are crucial to what I refer to here as independence in painting. The research is practice-led. In part a memoir of practice and making new paintings, in part based on fieldwork in the form of conversations undertaken with painters, the project aligns and tests painting concepts and theories against the details of artists’ experience and knowledge. The research is informed by the art and writing of Pierre Klossowski. The dissertation provides a further written investigation of findings. The project identifies that independence in painting is distinguished by its utility and shaped by the specific activities and material traits of painting, as well as the character of an individual painter’s contact with the art world. I link the mimetic character of painting—established in the research as the procedure that animates a painting’s reflexivity and its subjectivity—to the notion of independence. I show that these are interdependent and that mimetic processes are, in fact, implicit in painterly independence. The research also establishes that an individual painter’s independence is key to the formation and activation of the collective shape of painting, where it functions as an institution in itself. Painterly independence infers two kinds of independence operating in parallel: the painter’s/artist’s independence and that of the collective institution of painting (which is itself independent of the artist).
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ItemTo an end: Death as a queer theory of dance( 2023-04)How might death shift our understanding of dance? For artists and scholars, the constitutive question of dance has proven both long-standing and salient. In Western dance studies, certain theorists have dominated debate around what dance is or might be, and privileged vitality as the ontological norm at the expense of alternative views. Looking to this lack of diversity, this project offers a queer perspective on the liveness of dance through the lens of queer death. Drawing on the antisocial thesis in queer theory, which contends that political and symbolic associations between queer people and death might inform understandings of normativity, this project contrasts death with vital normativity to propose a queer theory of dance through queer death. To explore queer death in dance, this project utilises a dialectical practice-based methodology. Scaffolding this inquiry, reparative criticism is employed to identify and explore ideas of queer death in the field of dance and performance. Three works act as exemplars: "Black Flags" (William Forsythe, 2014), "Blind Date" (John Duncan, 1980), and the dancerly death of Freddie Herko in 1964. Concurrently, a creative work was developed across this project that involved a synthesis of experimental dance performance and visual artefact. Titled "They Spent Their Youths Dreaming of Ever New Annihilations," this creative work saw the author perform a ‘genetic suicide’ by undergoing a vasectomy, before exhibiting select artefacts from this procedure in the style of a memorial. In this thesis, the creative work and exegetical writing are presented with equal weighting for the reader’s consideration, with the creative work evidencing and exploring queer death in dance, and the writing contextualising its significance. This project finds that queer death in dance may involve a resistance to vital normativity and the future through a negation of bodies, form, and liveness. This thesis also finds that queer death might disrupt current views of Western theatrical dance as a live, corporeal genre through the counterfactual concept of corpofantasy. Reflecting on the limits of the antisocial thesis, this project also finds that the positionality of the White, male dance artist may remain bound to ideas of transcendence. This thesis also reaffirms that considerations of race and Indigeneity are critical to queer studies, and equally significant to applications of the antisocial thesis per the theory of dance proposed. This project ultimately argues that suicidality may evidence a tension between the plural corporealities of living, queer subjects and the corpofantasy of dying, with this underscoring a ‘wounded future’ for dance, over no future at all. In summary, this thesis provides a rubric for further discussions of dance ontology, and an example for queer theorisations and practices of dance that move away from vitality and towards death. Conscious that queer theory resists definition, this thesis argues for death as ‘a’ queer theory of dance, rather than ‘the’ singular, queer ontology. As such, this thesis yields new understandings of the role that death might play in dance theory and practice, while acknowledging the breadth of potential queer theories of dance as yet unexplored.
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ItemThe Alchemy of Auto//Mysticism: Subjectivity(s) From the In-Between( 2022-12)Through the lens of a visual art practice this research is an exploration of subjectivity as a multidimensional space of inquiry. Subjectivity is hypothesised to be in constant reflexive mutation and movement in-between singular theoretical positions and fixed politics of identity. Informed by peripheral cross-cultural histories of mystical practice this project’s neologism ‘Auto//Mysticism’ has been coined to conceptually frame embodied studio experiments investigating selected realms of metaphysical theorising and shifting experiential complexity. This inquiry is committed to a methodology of rigorous interior examination and expansive magical thinking as practice-led approaches seeking to destabilise and challenge predetermined pathologies assigned to preternatural narratives of experience. Auto//Mysticism operates in full embrace of its speculative origins and poetic nature whilst it also strives to communicate a clear logic of measurable (r)evolutions of ideas. What manifests in both artworks and writing is a thesis of discoveries revealed by a practice-led ‘self as subject’ operating as somatic source and as catalytic agent; in repeated speculative cycles of knowing and unknowing. The overall research journey reads like a historical and contemporary palimpsest of witchcraft, medieval theology, philosophy and ritualistic practice, chronicled amongst new materialism, queer theory, feminist principles and artistic lineages of self-reflexive analysis. The aim of this chosen scope of practice-based conceptualising is to research tactics and methods to physically explore metaphysical notions of subjectivity and build the argument of currency for embodied knowledges historically diminished as unscholarly by established hierarchies of cultural value. The hypothesised multidimensional reach of self-reflexive speculation is explored from within a spiralling research structure that proffers five subjectivities in orbit through five methods of practice. The five proposed subjectivities are: The Known Self // The Unknown Self // The Multiple Self // The Mutable Self // and // The Unknowable Self. Whilst their five intersecting exploratory methods are: Methods of Collection // Methods of Re-Collection // Methods of Accrescence // Methods of Attentions // and // Methods of Exchange. New artworks and corresponding speculations emerge from Auto//Mysticism’s spiral of iterative logic that builds from within and connects what has come before to what is yet to come. From its discrete space of attention and commitment to the murky work of speculative self-inquiry Auto//Mysticism emerges as a methodology that listens in the dark and feels for the edges and doorways // into other histories and worlds of inarticulable knowing.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableWho's Afraid of Aboriginal Art?( 2022-12)WHO’S AFRAID OF ABORIGINAL ART? investigated how intercultural curatorial models reframe and redefine narratives and understandings of Aboriginal art. Through a series of three original curated exhibition projects, this practice-led research expanded the framework through which the curation of Aboriginal art has historically been approached and/or confined. Each exhibition brought together diverse Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian visual art practices to generate profound intercultural resonances. Furthermore, each curatorial model was informed by an Indigenous worldview that acknowledges the interconnection and interdependency of life, materiality, and place. Collectively, the exhibitions form the core creative outcomes of this practice-led research and comprise 'one (&) another' (2020–22), 'In and of this place' (2021–22), and 'breathing space' (2021–22). Each exhibition deployed a different intercultural curatorial model for the presentation of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian art as a means of investigating how Aboriginal art is presented and how Aboriginal artists are represented in the broader context of Australian art. This was achieved through a visual and spatial levelling of artworld hierarchies (such as those that are identity-based, geographic, and/or medium-specific) that have historically informed the selection and display of Aboriginal art. For the purposes of this practice-led research, this exegesis presents each exhibition outcome within a respective chapter – “Chapter 1: one (&) another”, “Chapter 2: In and of this place”, and “Chapter 3: breathing space”. While the exegesis presents the exhibitions sequentially, they evolved concurrently. “Chapter 1: one (&) another” presents a dual-format exhibition featuring two distinct bodies of work: a collection of brightly coloured fibre baskets by Tjanpi Desert Weavers (Aboriginal) and a series of video works by Taree Mackenzie (non-Aboriginal). By bringing Tjanpi baskets together with Mackenzie’s video works, the exhibition interrupted artworld categories and binaries to emphasise the importance of opening up curatorial engagement with Aboriginal art that moves beyond the generalised identity-based tropes. “Chapter 2: In and of this place” is focused on an online collection-based exhibition that included a series of twelve “artwork pairings” that each comprised a historical landscape painting from the Benalla Art Gallery Collection (non-Aboriginal) and a work of art by a contemporary Aboriginal artist responding to Country in varying ways. This model disrupted the hierarchical power dynamics typical within collection-based exhibitions of Australian art. “Chapter 3: breathing space” examines a group-format exhibition that featured video, sculpture, text-based work, installation, and audio by four Aboriginal artists and two non-Aboriginal artists. The exhibition interrupted hierarchical curatorial notions of expertise by considering Australian contemporary art within an Indigenous knowledge framework that understands knowledge as collective as opposed to individualistic, and that operates across time and place. This practice-led research emerged from the curatorial hesitation that often exists between works of art by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australian artists in exhibitions, particularly in the context of Australian art. Each exhibition disrupted standard institutional curatorial methods of approaching, viewing, and understanding Aboriginal art. Collectively, they engaged a broader conversation about the curatorship of Australian art. As a diplomatic action in alignment with Indigenous protocols, each chapter begins with a contextual discussion that provides a synthesis of a range of curatorial histories and exhibition precedents. These initial discussions frame an in-depth curatorial reflection on each intercultural curatorial model and exhibition outcome because it is important that the reader understand my practice in the context of a lineage of curatorship of Aboriginal art and Indigenous curation.
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ItemThe Unstill Life: A Methodology for Drawing( 2022)The Unstill Life: A Methodology for Drawing Still life has been alive, moving and changing for more that 2000 years, it’s history animated by the ever-evolving objects that have been its focus. Similarly embedded in temporality, working drawings animate artistic production. The Unstill Life is a methodology for drawing that brings together the observation and representation of objects that is fundamental to still life, with the provisional and gestural qualities of artists’ working drawings. Despite what are often striking visual differences between these two forms of artistic expression there are quite a few similarities that can be pinpointed. My research has identified three modes of observation, ‘seeing’, ‘picturing’ and ‘referencing’ that encompass both physical and cognitive processes that are entangled in creative labour and function as separate modes of knowledge capture. Each mode of observation presents a slightly differently point of view and in many instances they overlap. In the artworks that comprise the creative research the modes of observation intertwine to produce a drawing methodology that traces the minutes, days, weeks and months of the candidature as it evolved through the writing and in conjunction with the studio practice. The Unstill Life results in the composition of seemingly abstract imagery, but on closer examination, the works are highly representational and depict various aspects pertaining to their maker and the environment that surrounds her.
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ItemMachine Driven Biological Evolution( 2022)Contextualised within the domains of biohacking and hybrid creative arts practices, this body of practice-led research utilises a multidisciplinary, perhaps a-disciplinary, approach to examine the manner in which evolution within the realm of carbon-based life and materiality is increasingly guided by the data and models that are deployed by silicon-based learning systems. This dissertation explores the prospect of machine-driven biological evolution through multiple theoretical lenses–tracing the connection between the history, ethics, and aesthetics of hacking to the contemporary use of algorithmic agents to examine and reconfigure the information that is encoded within a molecule of DNA, a dominant mode of data transmission within carbon-based life forms. The development of algorithmic agents–each an assemblage of data, code, and custom-built silicon-based hardware–use DNA sequence as their subject and creative material to shape and reconfigure and thereby contribute to the mass of data and models that lead to actions executed within the carbon-based world. The research and creative practice in this exegesis recounts the development of artwork that was installed in four separate exhibitions under the umbrella title of the Demiurge Project. Each artwork intended to draw the audience into an activated space where they would encounter an algorithmic agent at work analysing and repairing my genome and producing a manual of suggested edits that can be acted upon using customised (hacked) laboratory equipment. The first version of the Demiurge was exhibited in Melbourne, Australia followed by a second version of the work in Dublin, Ireland as part of the Perfection exhibition curated by the Science Gallery Melbourne. While the Demiurge installations explored the experience of collaborating with an algorithmic agent on acts of self-perfection at the molecular level of my body, the project of ‘perfecting’ the genomes by reducing the probability of harm and suffering due to heritable diseases turned toward my human progeny in another creative work titled Phanes. In two successive versions of Phanes–one installed for exhibition in Zagreb, Croatia and the other in Taipei, Taiwan–the artwork, installed as a functional laboratory, offers an examination of a recursive process of working in collaboration with algorithmic agents toward the production of genetically ‘healthy’ progeny that subvert normative expectations of ‘natural’ modes of kin-making. To further contextualise this practice-led body of research, the exegesis covers the broad and interdisciplinary terrain–from the role of gender in the historical development of contemporary hacking to recounting the experience of obtaining and analysing my genomic data before exploring what an algorithm with superior probabilistic model-building capabilities determines needs to be corrected in my own genomic ‘code.’
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