Centre for Ideas - Theses
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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.