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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ItemArt collectors in colonial Victoria 1854-1892: an analysis of taste and patronage( 1976)My examination of the holdings of private art collections in Victoria before 1892 is confined to British and European art. It was to Britain that taste was oriented, and the emerging group of Australian painters made little impact upon those patrons and collectors recognized as being the cultural leaders of the community. It would have been difficult to incorporate my research on collectors of Australian art in an essay of this length. I have therefore confined myself to a number of general observations set out in Appendix E. These may be useful in better understanding a part of the background against which British and European art was collected. I have limited my discussion to the dates 1854 to 1892. The former date was chosen because it was in that year that private collectors first publicly exhibited pictures in their possession. I have chosen the latter date because by 1892 the recession had taken a firm hold, and it can be confidently said that the first period of wealth had passed. By 1892 art and its market had all but ceased to be a topic of discussion in the Melbourne journals. I will concentrate on the 1880's; my Chapter on the period before 1880 is meant to be no more than a preface. The topic has been approached from two points of view. Chapters I to III concentrate on individual collectors, and attempt to establish, and then clarify, the various currents of taste which prevailed. My first concern was to identify the principal collectors, and then establish the extent of their holdings. The three broad groups that I have defined are discussed in Chapter III, and I have devoted Appendix A to summarizing this essential background information, while at the same time extending the number of collectors discussed. I will be searching both for evidence of motives for collecting, and for the way in which qualitative standards were established, though the results are generally disappointing. I have then approached the topic from an entirely different angle. I felt it important to take a broad approach and examine in more general terms the various influences which worked upon collectors. This has extended to the role of Melbourne's International Exhibitions, to the receptiveness of the community at large to foreign art and, perhaps most importantly, to the state and role of the art market in Melbourne in the 1880's. In doing this I was compelled to leave out detailed discussion of a number of collectors whose pictures might seem to merit a more considered treatment. It would have been possible to devote the entire essay to the first process of identification, and of compilation of holdings. Considering the exploratory nature of the essay, I decided it would be more useful to sketch in a wider background which could then be used as a basis for further research. I will argue that in general Melbourne collectors in the 1880's, while becoming increasingly receptive to foreign art, clung tightly to a wellentrenched, traditional taste for landscape. I will be exploring the background to a fairly wide resistance to modern figurative art, especially "Olympian". Although the 1880's represented the period of Melbourne's greatest wealth collectors did not, in fact, reassess their attitudes to the notion of "high" art. I will argue that from the market's point of view particularly the period was one of unfulfilled expectations. There have been limitations upon my ability to accurately assess the state and holdings of private Melbourne collections. Very few have remained intact - the crash of the 90's saw to that. For this reason I have had to rely almost exclusively on contemporary documents, and as my work progressed it became increasingly clear that the various catalogues and press reports were fraught with inaccuracies and inconsistencies. Thus, great care should be taken in accepting attributions. Contemporary scholarship in the field of Victorian art seems to be in a state of flux, and no clearly defined, commonly accepted critical terminology has yet emerged. In describing the various genres and types I have not imposed a strictly uniform system, but have preferred to use a variety of terms which might better help to describe the pictures, many of which I have been unable to illustrate. Because of the limits imposed on an essay like this I have decided not to include a discussion of the development of British aesthetic theory through the nineteenth century, of changing attitudes to landscape and such. I have used the word "taste" in its broadest sense. Ruskin, for example, early recognized the inherent "freedom" of the concept, and argued in Modern Painters "that taste was an instinctive preferring, not a reasoned act of choice". In fact, the publication of Richard Payne Knight's treatise on taste in 1805 marked the final demise of the eighteenth century concept of taste as an intellectual perception governed by reason When the term was used by authors and journalists in Melbourne in the 1880's it was invariably conceived in this broad Ruskinian sense. The problems that I will be identifying and discussing relate principally to questions of motive, and not the establishment of qualitative criteria.
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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.
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ItemThe art school and the university: research, knowledge, and creative practices( 2011)This thesis tracks changes in ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’ emerging from the incorporation of the art school into the university through the end of the 20th century. Identifying the need for historicised accounts of these contemporary institutions, the thesis synthesises the historical transformation of i) the modern university; ii) the art academy; and iii) the genre of the Ph.D. thesis that holds disciplinary knowledge in the arts and sciences through the 19th and 20th centuries. A key finding of this investigation is that these institutional forms have been revised according to different philosophical bases at different times, which is particularly evident in the substitution of science and natural philosophy for theology as the secular organising principle for the modern university. This displacement, which is also a repetition of its Christian heritage, begins in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, finally dominating higher research study by the 20th century. The investigation also finds that while studio art education has aspired to the status of liberal knowledge since at least the 15th century, its role as a university discipline remains conflicted, lacking a widely-held shared rationale for its modes of research that are nevertheless spreading rapidly through the provision of practice-based doctorates. The thesis argues that as with other new disciplines to the university, it will be through elaboration of a discipline-specific discourse drawn from the field itself that sustains its institutional acceptance, rather than the simple borrowing of other research definitions from other knowledge paradigms. Based on these findings, the final chapters of the thesis use scholarship in the history and philosophy of science to critique the Protestant-dominated moral economies embedded in scientific research paradigms that influence academic justifications for practice based research, with attention to postcolonial and feminist analyses of constitutive subjectivities underpinning these paradigms. The thesis then uses the work of Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler on archives of knowledge to elaborate a process of performative individuation in relation to material ‘bodies of knowledge’, arguing that such a process differs from idealist scientific relationships to constative knowledge, and that this offers a more appropriate paradigm for considering the contributions to knowledge of the visual arts. Drawing upon Derrida’s account of the ‘university without condition’ (2002) and Spivak’s account of humanities learning, the thesis argues that the critical culture of ‘singularisation’ customary to the visual arts can productively address current transformations in the mission and operations of the university. A short postscript considers the implications of this argument for academic policies governing practice-led doctoral qualifications.