School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemGlobal positioning: international auctions and the development of the Western market for Chinese Contemporary art, 1998-2012( 2018)This thesis examines the role of international auction houses in developing a Western market for Chinese Contemporary art from 1998 to 2012. It highlights six art auction events as pivotal for the transmission of cultural and economic value from local contexts to global acceptance. This thesis underscores the agency of collectors, networked art mediators and auctions to influence market expansion in the West, thereby revealing auctions as creators and consecrators of symbolic and economic value of Chinese Contemporary art.
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ItemAestheticising deformity: an essay on Cute and the Young-Girl( 2018)This dissertation makes an argument for understanding Cute as a distinguishable aesthetic category whose emergence across the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is intimately related to visual and verbal discourses of idealised girlhood. It performs its thesis through employing Cute to aide analysis of contemporary art photographic representations of the Young-Girl. The project sits at the intersection of art history, gender studies, queer studies and girlhood studies, and offers an original and significant contribution to each. The dissertation is broadly split into two sections. The first is a delineation of Cute as aesthetic category. This section outlines both the history of Cute, its emergence and development, and the aesthetic, non-aesthetic and cultural properties of Cute, their role in defining and distinguishing Cute as aesthetic category. The second section considers what Cute as aesthetic does in contemporary art photography focussed on the body of the Young-Girl. Unfolding over three art photography series, each created by a single young woman artist, this analysis is categorised according to the culturally-specific manifestation of Cute and the Young-Girl represented. Tomoko Sawada’s ID400 (1998-2001) meditates on the relation of Cute (kawaii) and the Young-Girl (shōjo) in Japan. The relationship of the Young-Girl (girl) to Cute (cute) in the US is explored through Holly Andres’ The Fallen Fawn (2016). The transcultural aesthetic of Cute and its relationship to the social category of the Young-Girl is considered from the vantage of postcolonial settler-nation Australia through Tracey Moffatt’s Invocations (2000). The dissertation argues Cute exists as a dual aesthetic category – both in the realm of popular culture as everyday aesthetic, and in the realm of visual art as art aesthetic. In the realm of popular culture, Cute evidences an aestheticised deformity; a violent alteration inflicted on bodies to make them simultaneously more inferior along culturally-constituted lines of infantilisation and feminisation, and – because of this inferiority – more economically and emotionally valuable and desirable. In the realm of visual art, this aesthetic experience is elongated, extended, re-directed, and the affect of what would be an otherwise disturbing image becomes a pleasurable sensuous experience which nevertheless retains a recognition of both the deformity, and the processes that aestheticise it. The interplay between these two affective experiences – between Cute as everyday and art aesthetic – enables the possibility of Cute to stage a subversive cultural critique. Inherently interdisciplinary, located within the realm of sensuous experience and affect, and concerned with abstract representations of cultural relations of power, identity, sexuality and bodies, this dissertation draws its lineage of academic inquiry from no particular discipline, but rather from extended considerations of cultural phenomena such as Julia Kristeva’s Pouvoirs de l’horreur; Mikahil Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World; Roland Barthes’ Mythologies; Carol Mavor’s studies of fairytales, the colour blue, and boyhood, and; Guy Debord’s La societé du spectacle. Its contribution is the interpretation of Cute as contemporary cultural and aesthetic phenomena. It strives towards a treatise on the subject of Cute and the Young-Girl.
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ItemLooking back: contemporary feminist art in Australia and New Zealand( 2016)This thesis sets out to examine the ways in which feminism manifests itself in contemporary art, focusing in particular on Australia and New Zealand. Interviews were conducted with practicing contemporary artists Kelly Doley, FANTASING (Bek Coogan, Claire Harris, Sarah-Jane Parton, Gemma Syme), Deborah Kelly, Jill Orr and Hannah Raisin. During these interviews, a number of key themes emerged which form the integral structure of the thesis. A combination of information drawn from interviews, close reading of art works, and key theoretical texts is used to position contemporary feminist art in relation to its recent history. I will argue that the continuation of feminist practices and devices in contemporary practice points to a circular pattern of repetition in feminist art, which resists a linear teleology of art historical progress. The relationship between feminism and contemporary art lies in the way that current practices revisit crucial issues which continue to cycle through the lived experience of femininity, such as the relationship to the body, to labour and capital, to the environment, and to structures of power. By acknowledging that these issues are not tied to a specific historical period, I argue that feminist art does not constitute a short moment of prolific production in the last few decades of the twentieth century, but is a sustained movement which continually adapts and shifts in order to remain abreast of contemporary issues.
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ItemFranz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-1873): portraiture in the age of social change( 2016)For nearly four decades, from the early 1830s to the early 1870s, Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805-73) was one of the most popular and renowned elite portrait specialists, who enjoyed the patronage of royalty, aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. The thesis aims to demonstrate that, firstly, the artist’s success and popularity among the highest echelons of society were contingent upon his professional abilities and bold innovations in portraiture which distinguished the artist among the portrait painters of his era. Secondly, the thesis reassesses Winterhalter’s portraits as visual documents in order to argue that their iconographic narratives encapsulate social changes of the nineteenth century.
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Item'Unlocked Doors': correspondence as female-centric writing practice( 2017)The aim of this thesis is to investigate, through critical analysis and creative work, the notion of a female-centric writing practice that not only accommodates but incorporates motherhood. By dismantling the central tenets of the nineteenth century androcentric Romantic myth of creativity, this thesis begins to imagine what a female-centric creative practice, built around women’s experiences, might look like. To do so, it investigates correspondence as a writing form commonly and traditionally practised by women that subverts the approach, value systems and goals of an androcentric model of literary production. I contend that correspondence has been overlooked as a feminist model for writing practice, and that it provides a blueprint for a female-centric model of creative process — a writing practice structured around a woman’s reality that does not insist upon a ‘room of one’s own’ with ‘a lock on the door’ as proposed by Virginia Woolf in 1929. This model would not be antithetical to the realities of motherhood, but would go so far as to acknowledge the benefits motherhood can bring to a writing practice. I hypothesise that in correspondence a tradition of ‘writing in the midst of life’ can be found that enables mother-writers to differently conceptualise the how of writing, freeing them from age-old conflicts between creativity and mothering. Specifically, this thesis uses a gynocritical analysis of the correspondence of successful mid-century Australian female poet Gwen Harwood to hypothesise the potential of correspondence as a model for a female-centric creative practice.
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ItemAnatomy of a workshop: the Procaccini family in Milan( 2016)Contextualized in Milan between the end of the 16th and the start of the 17th century, this study investigates the artistic trajectory of the three Procaccini brothers: Camillo (1561-1629), Carlo Antonio (1571-1631) and Giulio Cesare (1574-1625), one of the most important families of painters of the early Italian Seicento. Descending from an Emilian background, the Procaccini influenced the evolution of Lombard art, establishing a famous workshop in Milan and playing a fundamental role in the artistic renovation of the Borromean era, one of the most fascinating periods in Milanese art history. Procaccini’s work is here analysed under the reciprocal perspective of the family workshop, inter-connecting their individual careers and understanding their success as the combination of mutual artistic choices, high level of specialization and precise business organization. In doing so this study revises and updates the modern scholarly literature, which has generally focused on the Procaccini’s individual careers, underestimating both their connections as family members and the importance of their workshop as the key locus of artistic growth and stylistic innovation. Predicated on a micro-sociological approach aimed at understanding the social and eco-nomic conditions under which Procaccini’s art was created, the study is organized according to a chronological framework that retraces the conceptualization, establishment and evolution of their family workshop. Starting from Camillo, Carlo Antonio and Giulio Cesare’s biographies as drawn in 1678 by the Bolognese art historian Carlo Cesare Malvasia, it unravels the Procaccini’s business strategy, highlighting their mutual effort in becoming the most important family of painters working in Milan at the beginning of the 17th century. Dealing with macro-areas of analysis such as family workshops, artists’ training, aristocratic patronage and art market, the study looks at archival evidence of the Procaccini’s social and professional lives, proposing attributions based on documentary, stylistic and technical evidence. The result is a comprehensive analysis that, for the very first time, emphasizes the Procaccini’s role as a family of painters, providing an innovative approach for the study of their celebrated artistic careers.
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ItemAustralian animal painting and the human-animal bond in art( 2014)Animal painting is a critically important part of Australian art history, yet it has been afforded scant–if any–scholarly attention. Additionally, as the genre reached an apotheosis in the nineteenth century, animal painting represents a window into Australian society during a phase of rapid development. Domestic animals were a key part of society during this period, as cherished companions and as a driving force behind the expansion of Australian agricultural interests. This thesis begins the task of establishing animal painting within the annals of Australia’s art history. Commencing with an overview of animal painting in different cultures since the birth of art, the thesis then moves to consider the human-animal bond and its impact on the visual representation of animals. The human connection with other species has been represented artistically from Palaeolithic times to the present, yet the portrayal of animals in art is often dismissed as symbolic. By examining the science of the human-animal bond, the thesis explores why humans like to create and look at images of animals. It postulates that a connection with animals affects the way people view paintings when animals are part of the picture. In the same way, artists who specialise in animal painting not only exhibit a strong affinity with animals, they are able to capture the sentience and intelligence of their non-human subjects with greater veracity. Turning to Australian art of the nineteenth century, discussion focusses on the role of domestic animals in colonial society and on the artistic legacy of animal painters. Several artists are singled out for closer scrutiny, in particular, Harold Septimus Power. Septimus Power can be considered an archetypal animal painter: he evinced a strong connection with animals, was highly successful throughout his career and is largely overlooked and underrated since his demise. The intensity of the bond shared between mounted soldiers and their horses was played out in paintings portraying the Australian Light Horse in action during World War I. That Australian animal painters were on the spot to record these events meant their art contributed significantly to the horse-soldier bond forever being entwined with the legend of Anzac. By confirming the importance of animal painting in Australian art, this thesis suggests new avenues of research, both in regard to art and to the human-animal bond. Further exploration of the way animals have been represented in the art of different cultures, and into the significance of the animal gaze in art are just two of the ways in which the study of animal painting can facilitate greater understanding of the role animals play in human life.
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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.