School of Art - Theses
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ItemPossible worlds: recycling as a process of transformation in fan cultures and contemporary art( 2007)This research assesses the recycling of artistic practices as a process of transformation within popular culture, with a particular focus on the culture of fandom. The influences of Pop Art, Minimalism, Feminism and biography in the practices of Eva Hesse, Andy Warhol and Kylie Minogue are introduced and discussed. This provides an historical framework for a relational dialogue of biography, celebrity and branding in contemporary art and popular culture. The writings on fan cultures by Henry Jenkins and on Relational Aesthetics by Nicolas Bourriaud are discussed, and I put forward that they share correlations, as both these practices are engaged with the sociability of the participants and the audience. My work in the PhD exhibition My House, My Kylie, My Chateau....My everything at the VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery explores these themes. In the work and in the dissertation, I also reflect on the influence that relational dialogues and representations of women in art history and popular culture have had on my practice. The exhibition represented different aspects of my practice that incorporate recycling as a process of transformation, with the aim of generating new meanings. The first room displayed sculptural objects in a dolls-house scale, based on the personal knowledge of houses in which I have lived. These interiors incorporated references to past experiences and my own previous works, remade in miniature and displayed inside the houses in the form of video and mixed media. In another room is documentation and objects that were generated from the My Kylie Collection project, which was a visual and relational dialogue about the escapism of being a fan, through a series of felt and glass pictures, mirrored perspex objects, photographs and videos. In the third room the My Kylie event was a screened via video projection. This project in particular provided source material for both the exhibition and the dissertation, and includes interviews with the performers that demonstrate a variety of identifications with the reception of Kylie Minogue. This event took place at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London during 2004, and came about by an open invitation to the public to perform any Kylie Minogue song. An auditioning process revealed a range of interpretive modes and identifications with Kylie. They include women identifying with the femininity and coquettishness of ‘Kylieness’, of camp and drag interpretations, of women in popular culture, and of adolescent imitation and improvisation. This PhD explores the transformation of an image or memory through the process of recycling, linking with both Relational Aesthetics and fan cultures. Jenkins uses the term ‘filking’ for describing the common fan practice of interpreting existing texts, and he examines the association between the practices of the fan, the artist and the academic. Therefore, his work is central to my study, and its relationship to Relational Aesthetics is a topic of exploration in this dissertation. I posit that Relational Aesthetics and fan cultures share similar methodologies, where the dialogue between the performer and the audience helps to develop the work, and create new meanings.
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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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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.