School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe supremacy of decoration: the influence and legacy of the decorative practice of Frank Brangwyn in the Edwardian era( 2019)This study offers a new perspective on the practice of British artist Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) by establishing the aesthetic and functional ‘supremacy of decoration’ across his work of the first decades of the twentieth century. The term decorative was widely used in contemporary art discourse throughout Great Britain and Europe; yet a definition is elusive and problematic. The label is not, and has never been static, indiscriminately applied to a range of media and across different time periods. Focusing upon Brangwyn’s practice during the Edwardian era and its legacy, this thesis considers this concept through the formal and theoretical tenets of the mural and decorative painting movements, establishing the existence of a decorative formalism in the artist’s work and linking this characteristic directly with his critical and popular appeal. Furthermore, it traces the manifestation of this aesthetic approach outside of site-specific and functional sites of decoration to more autonomous contexts through examination of the artist’s intaglio prints – so called ‘painters’ etchings’ that were widely produced in England and Europe by the late nineteenth century. Through analysing Brangwyn’s role as a teacher in London and the circulation and impact of his prints outside of Britain in Australia, this study also shows that his decorative formalism was observed, admired and to varying extents, adopted by his younger contemporaries seeking to reflect a more modern perspective. The threads of British art explored in this thesis have rarely been linked with subsequent developments made by modern artists. Indeed the appeal of the decorative as a progressive formal strategy was short-lived and soon surpassed by other activities of the avant-garde. As this study reveals however, while Brangwyn was not a driving force behind modernism, his ‘decorative’ work of the Edwardian era anticipated many of the aesthetic concerns of modernity and is representative of one of the many unacknowledged ways in which artists began to articulate formal approaches to the picture plane in the early twentieth century.
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ItemPainting the banal: Dale Hickey and Robert Hunter, 1966-1973( 2019)A significant development within art of the 1960s and 1970s was the dispersal of the traditional artistic mediums, and their replacement by a disparate array of installation, performance, documentary and theoretical practices that have come to define the landscape of contemporary art. This thesis examines the historical emergence of this contemporary ‘post-medium condition’ through the work of two Melbourne-based artists, Dale Hickey (born 1937) and Robert Hunter (1947–2014), from their hard-edge modernist painting of the mid 1960s, to their engagement with minimalism, post-minimalism and conceptual art at the end of that decade and the beginning of the next. During this period, Hickey and Hunter became key figures within an avant-garde scene increasingly hostile to the traditional forms and institutions of art. Yet in their work, painting, the most traditional form of all, did not disappear under the pressure of its avant-garde critique. Rather, issues related to the medium—including its ongoing viability—remained central to their work. The persistence of painterly concerns was crucial for both artists’ work, as was a preoccupation with ‘the banal’—manifest in Hickey’s depictions of domestic and suburban objects and Hunter’s exploration of the bare materials of painting within a restricted formal vocabulary. A principal argument of this thesis is that the emphasis on the banal in both artists’ works, rather than blurring the distinction between aesthetic activity and ordinary life, was coupled with an ideal of art as a vehicle for contemplation that has its roots in painting. Both artists’ work is shown to align with the mystical conception of art promoted by Bruce Pollard, who founded and operated Pinacotheca, the gallery with which the pair became associated in 1968. Positioned in dialogue with their dealer’s quasi-religious attitude towards aesthetic experience, and amidst the druggy, bohemian ambiance of his gallery, Hickey’s and Hunter’s traffic with illusion, contemplation and aura is understood not as an anomaly within the prevailing materialist and rationalist narratives of the end of modernism, but rather as integral to the local artistic and cultural context in which they worked.