School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemStillness and motion: contemporary art at the intersection of the pictorial tradition and cinema's technological shift( 2015)This research investigates ways in which contemporary artists engage with cinematic traditions, via new technologies of viewing that bring cinematic paranarratives into focus, in order to generate new forms of narrative. Through practice-led research, the dissertation articulates a trend in contemporary art in which artists use the pictorial tradition of art in order to generate new narratives from familiar cinematic tropes. This is linked to the emergence of new technologies for the reception of cinema that allow nonlinear spectatorship. The dissertation argues that artworks created in this context provide a site where the history of cinema and art are intertwined, and central to this is the introduction of stillness as a key aspect of cinema reception. Stillness brings the hidden photographic base of cinema into the diegesis of artworks that evoke cinematic tropes. Rather than presenting stillness as a disruption to narrative, which has been a dominant approach in film theory, this dissertation asserts that by juxtaposing multiple narratives in a single installation within the gallery context, artworks use stillness to produce numerous possible narratives from cinematic tropes. The creative component consists of a series of performance and video installations produced between 2005 and 2010. These works create scenes that evoke incidental moments that appear to have been isolated from a broader cinematic narrative. They are evocative of cinema in general, but do not make reference to specific films. These moments are extended through time and expanded spatially, utilising the pictorial tradition of stillness. In the absence of defined linear narratives these artworks simultaneously fragment and synthesize disparate narratives. Through a combination of my own artworks and those of other contemporary artists, I will discuss the way artworks that apply stillness to cinematic tropes are able to explicitly evoke paranarratives that are inherent in cinema, but operate implicitly. Central to this argument is an examination of the materiality of the technologies that inform and facilitate artistic production. In this case, technologies of cinema and its distribution, including screens, projectors and DVD. Stillness and material presence are methodological approaches central to the pictorial tradition of art, but are here applied to cinema in order to generate new narratives out of well-worn cinematic tropes. By re-examining familiar cinematic tropes the thesis has re-directed an inquiry toward that which surrounds cinema and the transformations that occur when audiences leave the cinema. Through a recontextalisation of spectatorship in the gallery, this research has demonstrated how stillness, as part of the viewing process, has presented us with unprecedented methods with which to explore cinema as a series of “incomplete texts”.
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ItemMike Nelson's hybrid scripts( 2015)This thesis takes as its subject the work of the contemporary English installation artist Mike Nelson (born 1967). While Nelson’s work has been included in many major survey exhibitions of contemporary art, this thesis is the first dedicated, scholarly account of his work. It analyses his practice from the late 1980s through to 2013, focusing on the way that he incorporates fictional and non-fictional, and historical and futuristic narratives into his works, with a particular stress on the ways in which his work represents the past. While Nelson’s work is compatible with many prominently theorised trends in past-oriented art since 2000, which includes re-enactment, the archival impulse, retromania, the archaeological imaginary, anachronism, the temporal turn, and the artist-as-historian, none of these models fully accounts for his particular approach. It is my contention that Nelson’s ‘hybrid script’ method, which braids together site-specific, political and fictional narratives upon which sculptural or installation works are then based, is the most crystalline example of this unique approach. The hybrid script methodology has underpinned Nelson’s work since 1994. I discuss it in detail in this dissertation, in addition to considering the ways in which it has changed over the last two decades. My analysis is based largely on archival research and interviews. Nelson’s hybrid script methodology also distinguishes his work from that of the young British art movement, which is exactly contemporaneous with Nelson’s timeline and concentrated in the same city, London. Where the most stereotypical examples of young British art are said to communicate directly, using techniques gleaned from the mass media, Nelson’s works frustrate and delay clear communication through their warren of back-stories. The significance of this finding not only contributes to the history of British art since 1990, enriching a localised art history that can at times appear monolithic under the heavy weight of the yBa moniker, it also contributes to the discursive category of ‘installation art’. While much discourse on the ontology of installation art emphasises the centrality of the viewer’s literal presence in the work — the paradigm of immediacy — I show that, by contrast, the impact of Nelson’s work is typically belated. It occurs at a futural moment of looking back.
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ItemA vocabulary of water: how water in contemporary art materialises the conditions of contemporaneity( 2015)This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of how water in three contemporary artworks provides an affective vocabulary that gives material expression to the forces and dynamics that shape our current era. It argues water is not simply a medium or metaphor; in the artworks, it articulates and is symptomatic of the conditions of contemporaneity. Focusing on the dynamics of time, placemaking and identity, it argues water in the artworks makes present our era’s fluid, multiple, precarious, contingent, complex, disorientating, immersive and overwhelming nature. This dissertation uses Terry Smith’s theory of contemporaneity as a lens through which to identify the dynamics and forces of this era. By focusing on water in three artworks, it amplifies and extends his work to consider how the particular vocabulary of water materialises these forces. This is demonstrated through three case studies of exemplary artworks in different mediums, made between 2000 and 2004, by Zhu Ming, Roni Horn and Bill Viola. Drawing on Mieke Bal’s approach of conceptual travelling, I do a close reading of each artwork, orchestrating a conversation between the work, the concept of water and the theory of contemporaneity. Focusing on the role of water in each work, I argue water provides a potent comment on the conditions of contemporaneity, offering a new ontology that is appropriate to, and symptomatic of, today’s complex conditions. Each case study demonstrates several ways in which water captures something of the contemporary condition. Water in Zhu Ming’s Bubble Series (2000-04) materialises the ubiquitous and precarious conditions of contemporaneity. Roni Horn’s Another Water (The River Thames, for example) (2000) uses water to materialise a new kind of identity that is androgynous, in motion and contingent. Water in Bill Viola’s Five Angels for the Millennium (2001), materialises the sublimely immersive and disorientating experience of the contemporary condition. As such, water acts as a vocabulary in contemporary art that exemplifies, articulates and is symptomatic of the dynamics of our current epoch. In its varied and nuanced manifestations, water unlocks the conditions of contemporaneity; it offers an ontology of the present.
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Item'Parafeminism' and parody in contemporary art( 2014)Humour is a pleasurable and productive strategy for feminist artists; however, its role within feminist practice has received limited scholarly attention in the last two decades. The most recent study on the role of humour in feminist art is Jo Anna Isaak’s book Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (1996, Routledge), which frames feminist subversive laughter through the carnivalesque. Arguing that Isaak’s theory does not account for subsequent paradigm shifts in practice and ideology, this thesis aims to develop a conceptual framework that can explicate the forms and effects of humour currently emerging in contemporary feminist art. To develop this conceptual framework I draw upon art theorist Amelia Jones’ concept of ‘parafeminism,’ which suggests that contemporary feminist art is engaging in a revision of second wave methodologies: assessing and building upon earlier strategies by rejecting coalitional identity politics and reworking feminist visual politics of ‘the gaze.’ I interpret Jones’ theory by returning to Linda Hutcheon’s notion of parody, in order to frame three significant shifts in feminist practice: intimate corporeal preoccupations, phallocentric modes of spectatorship, and historical re-appropriation. To give focus to the influence of these changes in artists’ practice over the last three decades, I apply my framework of parafeminist parody to two major Euro-American case studies: an early Pipilotti Rist video, entitled Pickelporno (1992), and a more recent example, Mika Rottenberg’s video installation Mary’s Cherries (2004), as well as to a selection of works that traverse both video and performative modes of practice by three Australian artists (and collectives): Brown Council, Catherine Bell and the Hotham Street Ladies. Drawing upon writings from Freud, affect theory and corporeal semiotics, I extend Jones’ theory to this wider range of artworks thereby identifying ‘parafeminism’ as a greater phenomenon than previously proposed. To summarise, I aim to identify and develop a theoretical approach that will enable deeper understanding of humorous elements in contemporary feminist art.
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ItemJeff Wall: reading pictures( 2013)This thesis examines four seminal artworks by Jeff Wall. Through close readings I offer insights into the intellectual work in Wall’s picture-making and the dynamic relation between his writing and art. I argue that Wall’s photographs share the same resistance to resolution as the historical works that he draws upon. Such ambiguities indicate Wall’s interest in the instability of what he calls the Western Concept of the Picture, heightened by the need to negotiate transitions in the history of photo-media.
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ItemThe aesthetics of counter-memory: contemporary art and Australian refugee histories after Tampa( 2013)This thesis provides the first in-depth examination of experimental methods for memorialising Australian refugee experiences in works by the contemporary artists Rosemary Laing, Dierk Schmidt, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green. As this thesis argues, each of these artists’ methods for memorialising refugee experiences is distinguished by the use of montage (the conjoining of disparate materials and references). By bringing together—or montaging—cultural documents from a variety of sources at both a historical and geographic level, these artists create deeply fragmented images of refugee histories. Representations of refugee experiences such as those involving the Tampa, the “children overboard” affair and SIEV-X are juxtaposed and sutured with a range of other seemingly incongruous histories from the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In engaging strategies of montage and juxtaposition, this thesis finds that the artists examined therein develop a distinct paradigm of experimental memorialisation—termed here the aesthetics of counter-memory. Developed through a critical engagement with discourses on contemporaneity, globalisation, migration and memory, this thesis’ development of the notion of the aesthetics of counter-memory offers a historical and theoretical framework for understanding the import of Laing, Schmidt and Brown and Green’s experimental methods of memorialisation. In contrast to the notion of the “counter-monument”, which focuses on analysing official and state-sanctioned memorials, the notion of the aesthetics of counter-memory addresses the possibility of art directly intervening in the politics of memory of that which escapes collective consciousness: that is, the politics of who and what is remembered and why. As this thesis shows, in grappling with the politics of memory, the aesthetics of counter-memory refuses didactic or agitprop modes of communication and is instead structured by affective and poetic forms of address. The aesthetics of counter-memory determines our experience of migratory flows, place and inter-subjectivity through a series of analogies, resonances, ligatures, networks and border-crossings. It places montage and juxtaposition—the conjunction of heterogenous and at times seemingly incongruous things—as central to a critical understanding of experiences of place, migration and exile in the twenty-first century. In mapping the emergence of the aesthetics of counter-memory this thesis theorises and analyses a new paradigm of contemporary art and its impact on remembrances of recent refugee histories.
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ItemThe rise of the private art foundation: John Kaldor Art Projects 1969-2012( 2013)What role do private foundations play in a global contemporary art world? Not-for-profit art foundations presenting site-specific temporary art installations have become established institutions in their own right. This thesis traces the development of these foundations from the 1970s, placing their role within the context of the evolution of contemporary art institutions. My research focuses on Kaldor Public Art Projects as one of the earliest exponents of this form of patronage and support for contemporary art. The thesis examines the history and impact of Kaldor Public Art Projects, from Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Coast (1969), to Thomas Demand’s The Dailies (2012). It explains the motivations behind collector John Kaldor’s early invitations to leading international contemporary artists to travel to Australia to present temporary art projects. The thesis traces the subsequent evolution of the Projects. The thesis argues that consistent with trends in a globalising contemporary art world, Kaldor Public Art Projects became increasingly professionalised, formed embedded relationships with public art museums and was part of the rise of international contemporary art events such as biennales.