School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemThe Historical Formation of Chinese Contemporary Art and the Socialist Legacy( 2020)The subject of this thesis is the period in China from the 1950s to the 1990s, during which “contemporary art” (dangdai yishu) gradually emerged. This is part of a complicated historical narrative centered on the state. Existing understandings of this tumultuous period have been complicated by the fact that modern and contemporary Chinese art history has largely been written by critics—active protagonists—who have naturally promoted particular accounts. The thesis proceeds through an analysis of key debates and initiatives by artists, art critics and art historians inside China, drawing on primary research and interviews. The contention of this thesis is that contemporary art is not only an integral part of the culture that developed under the auspices of the state, but that Chinese contemporary art itself completely embodies the complexity and paradoxes of state culture.
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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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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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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.