School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 1 of 1
-
ItemContested space: an investigation of the structural foundations and historical consequences of conceptualist art practices in Australia, 1968-1988( 2004)This thesis is a broad, interpretative exploration of the structural foundations and historical effects of Australian conceptualism. Combining both historiographic and theoretical perspectives, it traces artists' efforts to challenge art's commodity status and institutional inscription through site-specificity and alternative art contexts, depicting the recent Australian art world as partly produced by struggles over the nature and purpose of art. In investigating these issues, the thesis advances three interrelated arguments. The first contends that although conceptualism has an integral history, the development of the Australian art system precipitated artists' critical interest in established art values, practices, and institutions, especially their concern for the impact of context on artistic meaning. The second contends that the diversity of contemporary exhibition contexts is a historical formation; alongside broad systemic influences their variation is a product of' artists' efforts to critically contest the values and relations artists sought in n reformed art sphere. The third considers the implications or conceptualism's evolving relationship to the main body of the Australian art world, highlighting the capacity of' oppositional art to both reproduce and transform the cultural structures that engendered it. Through these interlinking discussions, my aim has been to investigate the shifting nature and orientation of' radical cultural practice in post-1960s Australian art. While being thematic and issues-based, the five main chapters delineate a distinct sequence of historical developments. Chapter One discusses the necessity of conceptualism in Australian art by connecting it to the significant structural changes that affected the Australian art world from the late 1950s. Chapter Two challenges two pervasive views or conceptualism — that it emerged in the wake of the contemporary climate for social and political change, and that its criticality was compromised by being expressed in the context of the art system. Chapter Three explores how conceptualism initiated institutional change in Australian art, defining its basic trajectory around the semiotics of organisational form. To better understand the context in which conceptualism and the Australian art system evolved, Chapter Four investigates the expansion of arts funding under the Whitlam Labor Government. Chapter Five continues the argument that the diversification of gallery types in Australian art during the 1970s and 1980s was shaped by conflicts over the contextualisation and control of art, using the case of the emergence of artist-run galleries in the late 1970s. Drawing on new social movement theory, the study reappraises the nature of conceptualism's cultural politics, arguing that it exemplified the general struggle against institutional effects in late capitalist society. The thesis represents conceptualism as a logical response to the systemic elaboration of Australian art, identifying local cultural structures and relations as a vital arena for challenge. To this end, the study investigates how site-specificity became a major current in Australian conceptualism, recognising the increasingly diffuse nature of meaning, authority and agency in the contemporary cultural sphere.