School of Art - Theses

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End date: 2009 × Start date: 2000 × Type: Masters Research thesis × Subject: identity ×

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    Feeding
    Clarke, Kathryn ( 2009)
    In this research paper I examine the role of the Vampire, the space and culture of the share house and the interview as forms of social contract and control that both highlight and complicate notions of self, identity, other and persona. In Vampire lore, the Vampire requires an invitation to enter a person's home. Like the Vampire, in this project Feeding, I have sought permission or manipulated an invitation to enter a variety of people's intimate living spaces. Once inside, via an agreed interview, I begin an interrogation (and consumption) of my victims about their personal habits. In this way, I will argue I have conducted myself as a contemporary Vampire. It is in this guise that I extract information, adopting the interview as a research strategy in my art practice to generate raw material. This is then abstracted and deployed as installations, comprised of a few key components: projected video footage, sound, steel, the physical space of the gallery and the body of the viewer.
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    Double bind: splitting identity and the body as an object
    Ishii, Kotoe ( 2009)
    Double Bind: Splitting identity and the body as an object is a research project consisting of studio-based practice presented mainly in video installation format. This work looks at hysterical symptoms as a performance of a body’s split identity. The project draws on the Lacanian theory of Mirror Stage which proposes that the self experienced by the subject, and the image of that self (represented in a mirror-like reflection, or an image) are different to each other, and the development of self-awareness as misrecognition of one’s self. As a conspicuous example of split body, Chapter One describes how the hysterical body, in clinical and artistic representation, is dissociated into multiple selves. In Chapter Two, I discuss some examples of contemporary performance artists who use themselves as subjects, but whose bodies become objects that do not portray the self. In the final chapter I explain how, in my video work, I objectify my own body and how I assess whether this is a mode of self-portraiture. During the course of this research, I studied a wide range of medical resources and psychoanalytical literature, much of which employed visual illustration and documentation. For example, I have drawn inspiration from Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographic documents of female hysterics whom he treated as patients at the French hospital of La Salpêtrière in the late 19th century; in particular the figure of his most famous patient, known as Augustine. My research also involved studio-based investigation, such as experimentations with the performance of my own body in video format, and the contextual study of artistic and critical texts relating to contemporary media art. The aim of this research is to demonstrate the ways in which my video performances split the body, creating an Other within one body that can be compared with the hysterical body of a patient, like Augustine, performing for her doctor. In this condition, I perform as the subject and the object of the gaze at the same time. My self-portrait is split in this way: it creates a body double, which I misrecognise as myself. But in doing so, I am both the director and the performer of the image. This is the double bind that my video work puts me into.