School of Art - Theses
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ItemObjects that generate performance and performance that generates objects( 2014)Unfolding from a series of succinct studio experiments that use objects as scores for action, this thesis addresses the use value of objects and the effects of brevity as an artistic strategy. The written component grounds this practice — which has a background in experimental music — in a field of practices that are directly and indirectly indebted to John Cage treating them as a shared body of knowledge between art and music. Cage’s written score for 4’33”, his silent work, is explored in the writing as a direct influence on the development of the Fluxus ‘event score’ – a short written instruction for creating artworks – and it is this type of score that is the starting point for my own studio experiments. The Works<30s is a diaristic series of short videos that explores simple, succinct actions allowing them to exist as discrete, singular events. As with the ‘event score’, the series imposes a simple constraint on its subject matter (a 30 second time limit) that rather than restricting the outcome results in a variety of effects on content, structure and narrative. The Works<30s series proved pivotal to the development of other works particularly through the evolution of my thinking on the object as score and the elaboration of strategies that hold coalescence at bay – two concepts shared by the works explored in this research thesis. The two other main works detailed in this thesis are Species of Spaces a five-channel audio/video work and Things That Fit Together a sculptural installation, developing from the Works<30s series they document small simple actions, but collate them into larger collections. These works attempt to allow their elements to remain discrete in order to emphasize the relationship between each object and the performance it generates. This written component reflects the concerns of the studio-based research in its form and structure and is comprised of observations that move back and forth between historical and material research.