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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ItemJanet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: spatial environments and experiments in sound( 2018)This thesis is the first scholarly monograph that comprehensively examines the work of contemporary Canadian artists Janet Cardiff (b. 1957) and George Bures Miller (b. 1960). It provides a detailed account of their sound and media installations, audio walks, and video walks between the late 1980s and 2014. This thesis asks: how may Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s artworks be investigated and understood as sound installations? The significant focus of my research is Cardiff and Miller’s emphasis on recorded sound, media, and experimentation that has defined their works since the late 1980s. I emphasize that sound design (the mixing, layering, and editing of sound) was pivotal to Cardiff and Miller creating their self-described “spatial environments.” These methods and technologies enabled Cardiff and Miller to confront and redefine existing trajectories of sound, video, and installation art within contemporary art. This in-depth study of Cardiff and Miller’s artwork contributes to the discursive category of sound and video installation. The wider contribution of this thesis to the field is to develop and explain how sound is exhibited and encountered as contemporary art.
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ItemThis thing is intricate and it's everywhere: the art of Michael Stevenson as a model of historical time( 2018)This thesis is the first detailed, scholarly analysis of the practice of the Berlin-based New Zealand artist Michael Stevenson (b. 1964). It examines the substantial body of work extending from Stevenson’s paintings of the late 1980s to the research-based installation projects he produced in 2012. The research has been motivated by two questions: What is it that ties this artist’s practice together? And what is its particular contemporary relevance? An eschatological model of historical time built from the unlikely combination of fundamentalist Christianity and postmodern theory underpins all of Stevenson’s work. This model constitutes an important contribution to current thinking about time and history. Stevenson’s works are at odds with both the linear time of modernity, and also the pluralist and horizonless “presentism” of contemporaneity. This thesis stems from a recognition of the central importance of Stevenson’s early religious experiences to his later art practice. The significance of his religious paintings of the late 1980s has never previously been acknowledged. The cataclysmic collision of postmodernity and Pentecostalism in Stevenson’s life and thinking during the 1980s, however, was formative. Following his departure from religious faith, Stevenson’s art practice has been a multi-decade project to reconstruct a shattered world-view, and also a deep engagement with the historical conditions of our time. Repeatedly circling the intellectual problems he encountered in and around the late 1980s—problems thrown into relief by the coincidence of postmodernism, the end of the Cold War, and his departure from the Church—Stevenson has developed a model of historical time that draws from both postmodern scepticism and religious faith.
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ItemModernity and contemporaneity in "Cambodian Arts" after independence( 2017)This study of “Cambodian arts” since national independence understands modernity and contemporaneity as conceptually coextensive categories. Through detailed analyses of different artworks and their contexts—comprising painting, architecture, performance, cinema, and literature—this thesis proposes that modern and contemporary “Cambodian arts” are defined by coeval new and old forms, intersections between media, and an intertwining of art and ideology. It focuses primarily on the years 1955-1975, while also making trans-historical comparisons by interspersing more recent art practices into its discussion.
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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.