School of Art - Theses
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ItemProsthetic propulsion: mechanistic sculpture and interactive installation( 2008)This paper elucidates upon the research processes undertaken and artistic outcomes developed throughout the Masters of Fine Art project, accompanying the exhibition Pulse, held at Bus Gallery, Melbourne in November 2008. This project has focused primarily on interactive art and the role of the machine within works of art. The machine manifests as both an actual, kinetic element and as a symbolic means to explore the relationship between humankind and technology. The first chapter discusses interactive art, its potentials and difficulties, and relationships between interactive art and installation art. It explores the work of artists such as Jean Tinguely and OIafur Eliasson. At the end of the chapter, the term 'multi-motive' is proposed as a replacement for 'interactive art', to better encompass the work developed during the project. The second chapter deals with the machine within works of art, and in the broader social context, as both an emancipatory and threatening force. The machine is defined throughout as a prosthetic device. Artists that deal with machines and prostheses are discussed, including Jean Tinguely, Stelarc, Louise Bourgeois, Rebecca Horn, Richard Goodwin and OIafur Eliasson. It also briefly covers concepts such as the machine as parasite, the amputated prosthesis, visualisations of the human body as a machine, and the contemporary cyborg, looking at the work of relevant theorists such as Peter Weibel and Donna J. Haraway. These considerations lead to a discussion regarding the use of kinetics within this project, and the potential of kinetics as a means of exploring human nature, the human body, and its inter-relationships with technology. The final chapter explores artistic considerations encountered throughout the project, and experimentation and decisions made in light of these considerations. These include materials, processes, sound, lighting and exhibition within a gallery, referencing artists such as Jean Tinguely and Mona Hatoum. The investigations put forward throughout the paper bring numerous ambiguities to light. The concept of 'multi-motive' artwork blurs distinctions between artist, artwork and viewer. The machine as prosthesis is considered as an ambiguous symbol, destabilising the roles of prosthesis, parasite and host, thus bringing the pre-eminence of the human body into question. The decisions made in regards to artistic considerations also embrace ambiguity, particularly in the notion of twilight as a state of indistinctiveness. The use of these concepts in artwork created throughout the project led to a final body of work that embraces ambiguity, bringing the nature of humankind and its relationship with technology into question.
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ItemThe encounter of culture: a shared space or out of place? (Dismantling the self in Central Australia)( 2008)This doctoral project combines both written thesis and creative work—a suite of 60 large-scale photographic works entitled Encountering Culture: A Dialogue—which contextualises my on-going and sustained relationship amongst a specific group of Aboriginal families living in Alice Springs. My relationship with those families began in 1999 and has continued into the present. Encountering Culture: A Dialogue was first exhibited at The Victorian College of the Arts, Margaret Lawrence Galleries, Melbourne, in May 2006, and at The Araluen Galleries, The Araluen Arts and Entertainment Centre, Alice Springs, in November 2006. This exhibition/installation is the creative component of my doctoral work. This project draws together three main areas of research activity: a reflexive (critical) ethnographic practice, an Aboriginal pedagogy, and the creation of art. Effectually this becomes an examination of my own artistic practice; the theoretical and pedagogical frameworks that define this practice; and the conceptualisation of the analysis and representations. It charts the methodology required for an artist to step into an "unknowable" culture and produce a body of work out of the "experience". Hence, I argue, the history of ethnographic practices, and, in particular, the post 1970s re-evaluation of the discipline, is central to this project. This discourse analyses the constructed nature of identity; the structural ordering of speaking positions (enunciation); and the inter-relationship between knowledge production and power structures—all of which are filtered through an Aboriginal social code. Therefore the examination of subjectivity and representation exists within an inter-subjective and co-dependent framework, incorporating both a collaborative and conflicting arrangement between both parties. By positioning the "artist as ethnographer" I am able to draw together the central tenets of inter-cultural engagement: the acknowledgement of all subjectivities; a blending of (post)structural analysis and postcolonial discourse; the prioritising of an Aboriginal cultural schema; and the political and ethical dilemmas of cultural production. This analysis is then translated into local terms—the everyday (lived) life of Alice Springs—and articulated through an Aboriginal enunciation: verbally, through a series of informally recorded conversations, and, visually, through a suite of 60 photographic images. My methodology for translating the experience of "being there" into an appropriate representational form, albeit text or image, is achieved through "a politics of the performative", the re-enactment and re-presentation of subject identities within our culturally imbricated (and agonistic) relations the "dramaturgy" of inter-cultural and inter-subjective encounter. Performance, then, mediates the politics of identity and enables an assertive Aboriginal presencing to occur whereby a constructed and mediated environment is established for the recording and performing of selves. Performance, then, enables the critical examination of both the analytical and experiential and their points of intersection and contention—the place of vigorous negotiation and inter-cultural translations.
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ItemFeeding( 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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ItemConflict in Australia: shifting identities, art and self( 2009)My research aims to examine the following question: How has conflict shaped the Australian psyche and impacted on aspects of identity in Australian visual art? The written component focuses on how conflict has manifested in specific key artworks and culture, through a historical and cultural analysis. The written component examines two major influences on Australian identity. The first is the production and use of natural history painting by colonists in Australia, and how these paintings were used as a method of constructing, visually and conceptually, an image or idea of what Australia is. The second influence on Australian identity is the impact of conflict. The use of punishment by colonists, European settlers’ experience of hardship on the land, and the impact of World War 1 all contributed to the notion of the ‘Aussie Battler’, which was constructed by settlers, through their experience of conflict as a way of understanding their relationship to Australia. The use of masculine stereotypes in the artwork of Ben Quilty and Adam Cullen will be discussed, as a contemporary response to issues that have historical roots. My artwork is an exploration of personal identity through the idea of conflict in Australia both historically and contemporaneously. The paintings source images from history and from contemporary culture, in order to make links with the past and create future imaginings. The written component and the artwork both reflect issues of personal and national identity; masks are used as a symbol of identity, and of covered identity, turning an individual into a pack animal. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theory on becoming-animal is used in relation to identity. Specific examples from the work of artists Sidney Nolan, Joy Hester, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green will be cited in the discussion of conflict. My artwork responds to present and past conflict in Australia and imagines possible futures. Some of the artwork uses army imagery and camouflage as a way of visually suggesting the impact of conflict on personal and national identity.
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ItemExperiencing Kane: an 'affective approach' to Sarah Kane's experiential theatre in performance( 2008)The thesis investigates the theatre of British playwright Sarah Kane, focusing particularly on her last work, 4.48 Psychosis. This play about suicide, written by a playwright who then committed suicide, has been widely, and understandably, read as a suicide note that can have little political relevance or engagement with wider society. The thesis responds to this interpretation and argues for a re-evaluation of Kane’s last work. It contends that alternative, more political, readings of the play are possible and proposes that close attention to Kane’s term ‘experiential’ theatre is one way to produce such a reading. The thesis, therefore, undertakes an investigation into experiential theatre, and does this through a dual practical and theoretical methodology. I approach the research as a theatre practitioner – a director – and as a scholar, with the result that the thesis is undertaken and organised as 50% written dissertation and 50% creative work. In the dissertation I theorize ‘experiential theatre’: what it is; how it works dramaturgically; and how this dramaturgy can be read as politically significant. I adopt a predominantly phenomenological approach to argue that Kane’s experiential theatre is concerned primarily with the embodied nature of spectatorship and the visceral affect of live performance, and that this is the site of its potential political efficacy. The creative work, my direction of a production of 4.48 Psychosis for Red Stitch Actors Theatre (July-August 2007), investigates the viability of this new critical framework in practice. Out of this combined practical and theoretical investigation the thesis concludes that, given an appropriate critical paradigm, it is possible to read 4.48 Psychosis as experiential theatre, and to theorise experiential theatre as underpinning the political engagement of Kane’s dramaturgy. However, in practice, the work is only ever potentially experiential, being contingent upon the decisions made by the creative team, the unpredictable outcome of those decisions upon the individual spectator and the material circumstances of the production itself.
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ItemThe Museum of Lost Worlds presents: reconstructed artefacts from the Island of Tana Swiwi( 2009)Conflicting discourses are common, even in recognised ‘bastions of verity’ such as museums, and fictional narratives are often promoted as historical truth. I have created a fictional Javanesque culture, i.e. the Island of Tana Swiwi, mediated through the fictional cultural institution, being the Museum of Lost Worlds, through which to explore the idea that truth and meaning are divergent concepts. ‘Artefacts’ from Tana Swiwi are ‘re-constructed,’ and a ‘traditional’ ritual is ‘re-enacted’ for the Museum, in order to further develop that notion.
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ItemRain skating( 2009)In the Twenty First Century, cheap digital video has challenged the photograph for the distribution of visual ideas. Clip sharing sites such as YouTube now receive up to two hundred thousand uploads per week shared by one hundred million users worldwide. This exegesis and its accompanying exhibition, discusses the painting of the ordinary and banal in relation to this recent emergence. It consists of 6 oil paintings depicting skateboarding; all reconfigured from low resolution digital stills found on clip sharing sites, exhibiting many of the signs of degradation and artifacts that are characteristic of digital images. Representation of the day to day in painting has its own discreet history, extending back to French Realism in the 19th century. Numerous artists of this time, in the spirit of the flâneur, made popular by French writer Charles Baudelaire, explored the streets, boulevards and lanes for those encounters that would become paintings. By the 1960’s the painting of everyday life had also shifted to the direct representation of photographic material from personal snapshots to images circulating in the mass media. Today, an artist following these same interests is also likely to make these searches online. For scenes capturing the ebb and flow of humanity, YouTube has become the virtual boulevard for the digital flâneur, a conceptualization of contemporary browsing that mirrors the casual stroller of the physical city in search of fresh experiences. What this shift signifies, is the fact that much of everyday life is now subsumed to the digital. Painting is important in realizing the significance of this fact, due to its ability to reveal the scope of which the formats of popular media act as a go between in a viewer’s experiences, and its long and extensive tradition in documenting the events of the everyday.
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ItemStanding in the shadow of the moon: a diaristic encounter with identity through my everyday( 2009)Art and lived experience are the key to my work. Standing in the Shadow of the Moon – A Diaristic Encounter With Identity Through My Everyday is an inquiry into the various possibilities for photography as a diaristic medium that blends the concepts of documentary and tableau photography, whilst exploring my identity. In this mode of expression, my project is an investigation into concepts of self-representation and subjectivity. What does it mean to create an enigmatic series of 'self-portraits' that are focused on those around me, those whom reflect me, but are not me?
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ItemDouble bind: splitting identity and the body as an object( 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.
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ItemRomanticism: re-occurring sentiments( 2009)Romanticism: Re-occurring sentiments is an investigation of Northern Romanticism and its influence on contemporary art. Identified in this research paper is how romantic references are used in contemporary art and what separates these themes from their historical application. Central to this investigation is how the adaptation of romantic references found within the landscape genre can reflect the concerns of current culture. This is further pursued and examined in regards to my own art practice. In order to address these concerns I have separated this paper into three chapters. The first chapter explores the work of Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner. This historical foundation allows for the evaluation of the romantic themes within the landscape genre and an exploration of notions of the sublime commonly articulated. Concluding this historical investigation I briefly look at the work of Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer as they provide insight into the adaptation of the romantic landscape prior to contemporary art. The second chapter examines and identifies contemporary artists utilising romantic sentiments in their work. The initial historical exploration provided the parameters for the selection of the following artists: Edward Burtynsky, David Schnell, Stephen Bush and Julie Mehretu. Subsequently the similarities between these contemporary artists and my own practice are explored and defined. This area of research is supported and informed through an evaluation of the curatorial premise and the art in the exhibition Damaged Romanticism A Mirror of Modern Emotion, 2008/09 Houston, Texas. The final chapter identifies the concepts relating to my own studio practice. The development of this practice is articulated in regards to the visual and textual-based research examined in the initial chapters. Further, the architectural scale “painting/drawings” created, are discussed in relation to the application of medium. Consequently this application has allowed my work to utilise romantic sentiments to comment on the concerns of current culture. This depiction has enabled my work and research to identify a digital and technological representation of the contemporary landscape, one that has provided an area indicative of further artistic development.