Victorian College of the Arts - Theses
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ItemBreaking Objects: Activating Artworks Toward New Modes of Thought( 2019)This research has emerged from the intersection between two ongoing preoccupations: how to exhibit spatiotemporal art practices in such a way that the artwork remains active as opposed to static or on display; and, an engagement with the knowledge that reductive thinking about things in the world—from complex and interrelated to simplified and separated out—is part of the human condition. In order to better understand these oppositional factors and how they operate both theoretically and practically, I have come to define a number of key terms that I use to describe different modes of thinking alongside our capacity to flip or switch between them. These terms—Object, broken Object, and an oscillation in thinking—also describe the research methodology I have used in my practice-based research. I have developed this methodology across my literature research and dissertation by looking closely at what factors contribute to a mode of perception where things in the world appear to be active, in motion or complex. I have reviewed how this mode of perception might relate to and operate within spatiotemporal artworks and exhibition contexts by considering the physiological, psychological and philosophical factors that contribute to how we perceive the world, and what we think is going on. However, I have also considered factors that influence a more abstract mode of thinking about the world; one whereby we reduce, condense or separate-out complex and interdependent phenomena. This abstract mode of thinking has philosophical, sociological and political as well as physiological bases; all of which influence the way we perceive the world around us. I have considered one particular mode of thinking, Object-Thinking as being dominant in the West, and throughout my dissertation I reflect upon the possible socio-political consequences of this. In my creative, practice-based research I have applied the methodology of making and breaking Objects as well as proposing methods that might facilitate an oscillation in thinking across several research outcomes including: Chair in Cooperation with Orange (Extended) (2015), The Possibility of Performance (2015), Work (in Progress) (2016), Cross-Section (2017), Tool-Things (2017), Set Elements (2019). My final practice-based outcome, No Single Thing (2019) was exhibited at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery between the 26th February and the 1st of March 2019.