Centre for Ideas - Theses
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ItemAgency and affect: curating political change( 2017)'Agency and affect: curating political change' is a practice-led research project that considers the relationship of art to political change, and the critical possibilities for agency in this relationship. To establish this, I develop and elucidate a theoretical framework for understanding art's operation in the social and political sphere, and relationship to the individual audience member. By foregrounding first an understanding of how an artwork operates within a relational sphere of individual subjectivity, I elaborate a new position arguing that the artwork and its affective potential can generate individual insight into the limits that bound behaviour and thought and, through this, enable a sense of agency in contributing to change through challenges to those limitations. I develop this framework through the process of conceiving, developing and staging a series of curatorial projects, employing the practice of critically-engaged curating as a research methodology, using a mode of curating situated within the discipline's contemporary discourse. The ideas of social agency, and engagement of a political nature, are intrinsic in the content, form and presentation context of each curatorial project. Interspersed between, various ideas are tested against these curatorial projects over the course of the research, and the results form the ground for the subsequent projects. This process of testing and evaluation of concepts against actual artistic projects and their strategies, feeds into the development of a robust theoretical framework for considering art and agency. The research paper concludes with an argument for how this framework offers a recalibration of the nexus between art, the political and everyday life and, in light of this, the ways in which an artwork might be measured and understood. The creative work is the curatorial development and realisation of the three projects: 'Civil Twilight End', 2011, a permanent public artwork situated in Melbourne’s Docklands; '[en]counters', 2013, a program of temporary performances and installations staged in the public sphere of Mumbai; and 'David McDiarmid: When This You See Remember Me', 2014, a retrospective exhibition presented at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
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ItemThis is my body: re-imagining the mother and the sacred in art and ordinary life( 2017)This art practice-led project re-examines traditional images of the maternal body in Christian visual culture in order to generate new motifs that more ethically imagine the mother and the sacred for our time. Traditionally, the maternal body is represented as the Virgin Mary: a static, silent, vessel-like figure made divine through relation to her son. In this economical rendering, mother and woman are conflated, and bear little resemblance to real and ordinary maternal experience. Furthermore, given the dominant patriarchal culture of Christianity from which it arises, such a singular symbolic also prohibits the development of a feminine imaginary in divine terms. My research seeks to address this lack through engagement with the thinking of Luce Irigaray whose philosophy proposes an approach to human becoming that recognises and preserves sexuate difference. Remembering our origins in the mother – more precisely, the woman in the mother – broadens understanding of the Incarnation of God and its implications for our own being in terms of our difference and relation-with an other in ordinary life. New artworks and interdisciplinary connections proceed from my engagement with Irigaray and others, including philosophers Marie-José Mondzain, Julia Kristeva and Roland Barthes, mystic Julian of Norwich, and theologians Rowan Williams, Catherine Keller, Elizabeth A. Johnson and Heather Walton. In the studio, my practice draws on existing iconographic and architectural patterns from Christianity and my Anglican tradition, and four distinct new motifs for representing the maternal body emerge: Performing the Icon, Lament, Sacred Canopy and Lullaby. She moves, speaks, weeps, protests, makes space and sings in loving, knowing, thinking relation-with her child and her self. In each case, the woman in the mother is revealed and comprehended in terms of her multiple, relational, generative and enduring capacity. (Notably, she is never fully known, since she is irreducible and transcendent in her difference, as Irigaray proposes.) These motifs suggest that a religious symbolic will only contribute to our human becoming when it is invigorated by a feminine imaginary, characterised by a proliferation of images that variously identify the mother and the divine in ordinary contexts.
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ItemInvisible words: the semaphore of skin( 2017)In 2003, upon the death of my father, I found four letters. Three were written by my grandmother – a woman I never knew and who was rarely spoken about – and the other recounted the events that led to her deportation and death in a Soviet work camp in Siberia in the 1940s. Viewed as correspondence, as depositories of memory, as suppressed herstories, these inherited artefacts invite questions concerning language, words and images – their ability to at once reveal and obscure meaning, their power to manipulate or be manipulated by both creator and spectator. Perhaps more significantly, these artefacts, like some enigmatic umbilical cord, some sinewed, ancestral thread, urge an unforgetting and reshaping, a giving voice and material expression to that which had been previously silenced and concealed. ‘Invisible Words: the semaphore of skin’ draws on cross-disciplinary practices to articulate the impact of an inherited trauma and silenced memory. The project has at its origins these once-hidden letters, and the several photographs that accompanied them. Although these artefacts clearly expose themselves as narratives of trauma, they also reveal, in what they don’t say, a multilayered censorship. As custodial progeny of this embodied trauma, this thesis and the creative works developed seek to translate beyond the written and argue for an inhabitation of the liminal in order to articulate the impact of a previously silenced and concealed trauma. The creative component of this project has involved both studio- and field-based research and utilises the mediums of photography, video, installation, play-writing and ‘skin’ – a practice situated on the traumatic periphery inhabited by roadkill – to give material form, voice and expression to this sensorial and familial wound.
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ItemThe untranslatable, a poetic place( 2017)This research project is concerned with ‘the untranslatable', which I identify as that which, in art, resists translation into everyday language yet touches me lovingly and truthfully. Through a manner of ‘poetic translation’ that is experiential and reflective as well as semantic and material, and by questioning how an artwork can embody the untranslatable, the project develops concepts to think about the untranslatable and to articulate its presence within an installation artwork that allows for new meanings to enter through audiences’ engagement with the work. Informed by philosophical, theoretical and artistic works that share concerns with the oppositional and draw our awareness towards neutral, subtle and nuanced appearances and understandings of the world, the research investigates the poetic works of art that liberate and provoke our perception and sense of being in this life-world. The research is undertaken through my experiencing and reflecting on these elements: my grandmother’s poetic enunciation about Mt. Aso, shifting shadows of an acrylic cube (a remnant), and Jacques Derrida’s interpretation of chora and ma as a place for ranslation/transference, which is untranslatable. This process, which in turn draws resonant voices from various disciplines, not limited to either Western or Eastern knowledge, to ancient or contemporary time, to one side or one sex, is manifested in my art-making and thesis writing; my artworks inspire and test my thesis, together investigating these five key concepts: ‘Pure Language’, the ‘Poetic’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Transference’ and ‘Embodiment’. As anyone struggles with that which resists translation in art, The Untranslatable, a Poetic Place, is written for both artists and audiences. Within the context of this thesis, ‘the untranslatable’ can be best defined as the life that drifts as it metamorphoses and transforms our experience in and reflection on the world in a more rich and poetic manner. As it ‘transfers’ in variant ways, it can only be embodied temporarily by the poetic work of art; in a poetic language that contains ‘fertile silence’, an architectural body that internalises emptiness/hollowness, or an enduring form of love that longs for motherhood. This embodiment is perceived and experienced as ‘shadow light’ (as truthful, an aid to knowledge) that shifts; an ambiguous image that shimmers; a nuance of love that trembles; or a poetic place that opens.
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ItemSmart Ajumma: a study of women and technology in Seoul, South Korea( 2016)The ajumma is one of the most misunderstood categories in Korean culture. Roughly translated as a woman that is married and middle-aged, the ajumma is one of the most stigmatized demographics in Korea today. This PhD project seeks to undercover some of the complex ways in which we might redefine the ajumma as a woman that has played a pivotal role in Korean culture post IMF bailout in 1997. Through exploring ajummas as new media users, this PhD project not only seeks to debunk the stereotypes around the category but also to provide a more nuanced study of gendered new media practice beyond the young-new media “digital natives” conflation in one of the countries lauded for new media innovation, Korea. This PhD project deploys an interdisciplinary model of the research that combines academic practices (e.g. a dissertation) and creative practices (e.g. Digital Ppal-let-ter video project and Smart Ajumma blog).
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Item(K)rap(p): voice as gaze in the mundane( 2015)(K)rap(p): Voice as Gaze in the Mundane examines ekphrasis - the “telling of vision” - in contemporary art. Between the scenario of Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape; unorthodox voice recordings by Konstantin Raudive, recorded interviews and archived material relating to my deceased parents’ involvement in the Communist Party of Australia during the 1950s; a type of proletarianisation of the gaze, an ekphrastic dematerialisation and re-materialisation of vision is interrogated into political and uncanny dimensions. The ekphrastic relation to art is that of viewing and articulating, visually rendering an articulation as an inversion of ekphrasis. The sonorous act of verbalizing becomes visual representation, therefore art. Paradoxically the notion of what constitutes art is complicated by its own description. The research begins with the examination of art and voice in relation to ekphrasis, hypothesising whether ekphrasis might be made visible as art through its inversion and concludes with voice in relation to the spectral, invisible in both social and political terms, made visible through the unification of sound (voice recordings) and image (archival and artefact), in which selected audio and visual material are manipulated to form artwork. The exhibition created for this project was an accumulation of these manipulations, found and fabricated artworks in the form of photography, voice recordings and collated archival material including original documents regarding the Communist Party between 1948 and 1960. The selected material was presented with archaic voice recording equipment as part of the Installation project exhibited at the Margret Lawrence Gallery in February 2015. The exhibition was not just a product of research into the Communist Party of Australia, but of voice in the broader sense. Voice has been examined from multiple facets, in its many incarnations and it is through Samuel Beckett’s work and Raudive recordings that voice as a subject of the gaze has highlighted the uncanny potential of voice as gaze.
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ItemThe responsibility of the media: occupation in East Timor and Western Sahara( 2015)The military occupations of East Timor and Western Sahara almost mirror each other, but they are small and insignificant according to the rules of traditional realpolitik. The thesis asks: What was the responsibility of the media in the occupation of East Timor and the continuing occupation in Western Sahara? In Chapter 1 – “Letting East Timor Speak and Breaking Indonesia’s Information Blockade 1975-1978” - the Indonesian military’s bloody invasion of East Timor and its campaign of “encirclement and annihilation” was broadcast by Radio Maubere, an illegal and underground radio network, to an increasingly disturbed and alarmed group of Australians led by Denis Freney. While the broadcast was heroic, Radio Maubere was ultimately flawed. In Chapter 2 - “The Responsibility of Filmmakers: Before and After the Santa Cruz Massacre” - I discuss Noam Chomsky’s argument that the American media were responsible for the genocide in East Timor. However, in 1991, Max Stahl’s film footage of the Santa Cruz Massacre helped in turning around years of international indifference and apathy. In Chapter 3 – “Scenes From An Occupation: East Timor 1999” - I return to my documentary film, Scenes From An Occupation, which I filmed in 1999, during the last six months of the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. In order to re-examine my own responsibility as a video-journalist and filmmaker, I interrogate documentary filmmaker Pamela Yates’ statement that “sometimes a story told long ago will speak to you in the present”. In Chapter 4 – “Who Speaks For Fetim Salam?” - and Chapter 5 - “Western Sahara: How To Stop A National Liberation Movement” - I explore the irresponsibility of filmmakers via a discussion of the controversial and discredited Australian documentary Stolen (2009). This film, which was publicised heavily online and shown repeatedly at international film festivals, alleges that the black-skinned Saharawis are slaves in the Polisario-run camps in Algeria. As such, after almost four decades of media neglect of Western Sahara, Stolen managed to combine both mendacity and sloppy documentary practices. In these two chapters I deconstruct both the film and its critical reception, taking Carlos González’ film, Robbed of Truth: The Western Sahara Conflict and the Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking, as a starting point. In Appendix 1: As part of the practice-based component of this thesis I write a feature length script, based on my previous research on East Timor called The American Brother. In Appendix 1 – “Notes to The American Brother” - I examine the relationship between history, character and the responsibility of the media.
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ItemBeautiful little dead things: empathy, witnessing, trauma and animals' suffering( 2015)This sculptural practice-led research investigates empathy, trauma and witnessing and the role of testimony in visual arts practice. The thesis argues that Edith Stein’s phenomenological account of empathy articulates an empathic encounter that recognizes the alterity of the other. Stein’s account, I argue, can be drawn out to include encounters with nonhuman animals and sculptural objects that resemble embodied forms. Responding to developments in my sculptural practice the research examined the possibility of visual art practices to bear witness to the ongoing suffering of animals: marking out the possibility for sculptural objects to perform as testimonial objects. As testimonial objects they attest to the trauma of the one who witnesses for the other. Ethical considerations in relation to materiality, representation and the position of one who testifies for, or on behalf of, the other are examined.