School of Art - Theses
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ItemBeing scripted( 2012)This thesis examines the role of materiality and site-specificity in generating performancebased film work. In focus, is how the body can be scripted, prompted, or instructed by thephysical characteristics of objects and spaces that it encounters. Historical and contemporaryvideo art and filmmaking practices are surveyed bringing into question the parameters of“object” and “performance” shaped through the medium of film. This paper and the creativework that has subsequently developed, considers the potential of film, to facilitate performancethrough its embodied sense of time and durational framing.This thesis is separated into three sections, which examine the foundations and outcomes of myproject with reference to creative practices that have influenced and shaped my understandingof the dynamic nature between performance and film. The first section identifies with myrelationship to sculptural practice, and works to unpack the elements of this discourse withreference to objects, space and the performing body. The second section revolves around“repetition” as a generative force within the context of performance. Practices and texts areexamined that illustrate the relationship between actions and futile outcomes. The final sectionof this paper focuses on the impact of specific cinematic practices, which have played a seminalrole in the development of my conceptual and technical relationship to performance and themoving image. This thesis is separated into three sections, which examine the foundations and outcomes of my project with reference to creative practices that have influenced and shaped my understanding of the dynamic nature between performance and film. The first section identifies with my relationship to sculptural practice, and works to unpack the elements of this discourse with reference to objects, space and the performing body. The second section revolves around “repetition” as a generative force within the context of performance. Practices and texts are examined that illustrate the relationship between actions and futile outcomes. The final section of this paper focuses on the impact of specific cinematic practices, which have played a seminal role in the development of my conceptual and technical relationship to performance and the moving image.
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ItemCrossing between cultures and self-portraiture( 2012)My journeys have forced me to analyse the movements of contemporary art and the traditional ways of using the languages of painting to carry personal perceptions that generate memory. A single, personal story develops into a global story from the awareness of the particularity of migrant backgrounds and foreigners’ points of view. The story transforms into the body of work where thought processes are determined through physical engagement with the materialities of painting. Through painting the process of juxtaposed journeys is not only remembered, they are discovered. Through gesture and layers, forms interact with thought making a metaphoric suggestion of something like the topographical mapping of experience.
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ItemDisavowal and the erotics of painting( 2012)This research project aims to traverse the paradox between the prohibition of touch in relation to art and digital technology – and an erotic’s of painting. Painted works and the exegesis explore concepts pertaining to a Baroque vision, through ideas of correlation, and its relationship to the contemporary visual language of the ‘screen’, whilst expanding upon ideas pertaining to mediated visuality. In the chapter Sense and Sensibility, I draw upon Deleuzean philosophy in order to describe the relation between painting and hysteria; that painting directly attempts to release the presences beneath and beyond representation. In Structures and Signs: The Iconography of Desire, I look at some historical conventions implicit within the formal baroque compositional devices in painting as well as the aesthetic model of nomad art defined by philosopher Wilhelm Worringer, ideas pertaining to intertextuality put forward by philosophical linguist Mikhail Bakhtin and the concept of open totalities posited by Gilles Deleuze, in order to elucidate upon these aesthetic models that can be drawn upon in order to support ideas reinforcing the primacy of a language that can be purely visual. By reducing all form to the traits of painting, can they act as signs, but without the modernist sense of a search (for truth)? Within my work gesture is used as part of the visual vocabulary of painting, which speaks about the history of painting through quotation, although with an absence of motif, the mark is the motif. I re-contextualize the notion of the baroque, and its relationship to contemporary visual languages, and discuss the works of filmmaker, Peter Greenaway and visual artists Daniel Crooks and David Reed in order to define a possible new path for painting in the digital age. Redefined in this way, painting has a way of transcending it’s flatness, whilst facilitating the correlation that entails the transformation of both spectator and painting that characterises baroque point of view and enacts the ‘erotics’ of painting; the intricate connection between desire and vision and how the painting may inscribe the viewer as participant. I also discuss the paradox between the fundamental prohibition attached to works of art – that they are not to be touched, and the erotic aspects of painting, in relation to our mediated visuality as part of ‘screen culture’. I propose that painting can respond to this via a photographic/digital model of representation. The project will aim to address ‘the photographic’, in the way in which one sees digital and photographic technology as an instrument of seduction rather than simply as a means of reproduction. An exhibition titled “Stutter Speed” accompanies the written thesis. Comprised of large-scale oil paintings mounted onto aluminium, it aims to elucidate upon ideas explored within the accompanying exegesis. These works are contextualized by their status as a non-photographic/digital image in a world dominated by the screen and as such, they reference the photographic/digital as a power. Collectively, “Stutter Speed” and the thesis “Disavowal and the Erotics of Painting” form my Masters research project.
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ItemWhat's wrong with your voice?( 2012)The research component of my project investigates voice as a vehicle of meaning and voice as an aesthetic material but also an understanding of voice as an object, as a lever of thought. The main impetus of the paper is how the voice operates after death and the consideration of reattaching my disembodied voice to my dead body in the future event. The works of John Cage, Samuel Beckett, On Kawara and Mutlu Çerkez (among others) inform my current investigations into the position of voice. Situating the voice as a material within a sculpture and spatial practice, my project investigates the voice as it stands between body and language, between subject and other: afterall it is the sound of the voice that will remain as a trace and resonate our absence.
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ItemTasmania's toy box: exploring loss of innocence through art( 2012)This thesis enters into contemporary debates concerning the cultural investment in innocence. Drawing on my own childhood in Tasmania, this project is driven by the awareness that there are children burdened with knowledge many adults are shielded from. I am seeking, in painting, the means to express this reassignment of roles, using imagery chosen for its capacity to provoke ambivalent responses in the viewer. This is less an argumentative essay than a meditation on the theme of lost innocence. It will examine innocence as an enclosed or guarded space imminently endangered by that which might disrupt the picture, demonstrated through the territorial limits created by the framing of narrative landscape. I will discuss my painting depicting a fire within a Hobart landscape, drawing influence from Colonial paintings of Tasmania - the unease of these images and their contentious relationship to history providing a backdrop for considering less visible manifestations of violence in art. I will also offer a reflection upon language, and in turn the mute subjectivities of animals and children as marginalized in relation to humanity. In this context I will also consider the ethical importance of the face in philosophical discourse, while discussing my paintings of Tasmanian Devils. The mythology attached to this species’ name also provides a platform for speculation as to complex cultural investment in innocence. This thesis aims to provide a poetic and philosophical framework for an investigation into the subject of innocence, which will complement my series of paintings produced in the context of this research. The project hinges upon time - as introduced by the figure of the horologe in a shopping arcade, the enigmatic temporality of childhood acts as a filter through which various ideas and theories are examined. The present day arcade returns the reader to the temporality of childhood – the ever-present dimension of “once upon a time…” - where the silent figures of animal and child are brought together through the emblem of the toy. This dissertation accompanies my studio practice, which takes the form of a series of paintings that are in dialogue with current painting trends and concerns. The paintings presented will reflect three main ways of exploring loss of innocence, which are nevertheless linked through the filter of childhood memory, knowledge and location. My paintings are situated in a contemporary context through a process of engagement and comparison with present day expectations of painting styles and images, variously by their differentiation and similarities. Artists and writers discussed in this thesis are those whose works deal with power relations and violence, and their representation. They include Rodney Pople’s painting Port Arthur, and Degas’s Night exhibition, Adam Cullen’s paintings of Tasmanian Devils, and Yvonne Kendall’s sculptures utilizing toys. I will discuss Martin McDonagh’s play The Pillowman, and will draw on a number of philosophical and scholarly texts, those by Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Joanne Faulkner among others.
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Item“Without the room to roam we are but contained”( 2012)“Without the room to roam we are but contained” is an investigation into why the body travels between the security of one place, and on to foreign ‘unknown’ spaces. This research has been achieved through my direct experience of places with high public circulation: the airport and the hotel room, in countries such as Japan and India. My observations about Nomadic movement in these surroundings were reinforced by this ‘Neu Nomad’s’ reading list of classic literature. This included Ernest Hemingway, Arthur Rimbaud and Jack Kerouac, to name but a few. Further research on the spatial philosophies of Henri Bergson and Yi Fu Tuan has been contrasted with a personalised spatial ethos. In order to visualise themes of Nomadism and connection to place, I created temporary studio sites in selected overseas locations. This study addresses the notion that ‘the spaces in between’: breaks in dialogue, the halts within space and missed connections, are the key factors in a Nomadic existence. These are the things that provide us with opportunities to roam in ‘duration’ beyond containment.
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ItemEmbodied practice, experience and intuition( 2012)This thesis presents an account of the means by which I have attempted to overcome a time of major crisis for me as an artist where I have not enjoyed ‘the making’ aspect of my practice. Practice has led me to this research, and it is imperative that research revitalizes and rejuvenates my practice in turn. Three kinds of movement guide the direction of this analysis. Firstly: rehabilitative exercises as an extension and continuation of my ‘making’ practice. Secondly: pedalling a bicycle as a conceptual model for a sustainable practice where ‘the thinking and the making coax each other into being.’ Thirdly: standstill, in which my studio practice becomes concerned with the particularity of this time, when the artist, ‘despite the urgency of the situation … [is] haunted by the question, one worth of the idiot: we [artists], what are we?’ These movements in turn propel discussion in the four subsequent chapters: the framing of embodied practice, the harnessing of the potential of experience, the philosophical critiques of the position given to the artist in the production of the readymade, and the notions of abstraction, relation and intuition and their role in material practices. Through examining writings by Gilles Deleuze, Elizabeth Grosz, Boris Groys, Agnes Martin and Isabelle Stengers and others, as well as other modes of production such as cooking and football, this thesis explores my approaches to my ‘making’ body’s state of crisis and how new ways of generating movement may become possible for that body. This thesis is accompanied by a presentation of a body of artistic work comprising of a sculptural installation titled Enquiry on Porosity.
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ItemIn the realm of phobia: exploring the duration of repetitive schizogenesis and ambiguous morphs( 2012)This research explores the ‘in-between’ as a field of encounter, collision, penetration and fission in visual art practice. I accommodate my own phobia and its power as the main discourse to traverse the gap between the conscious and the unconscious, and to retrieve latent memories along with emotions and sensations. By examining how fear influences me, and triggers paranormal phenomena in perception, I acknowledge fear as a predominant impulse in making art for it constantly reaffirms its significance within my work. I have referred to Freud and Jung’s ideas about the function and meaning of dreams in order to adequately inform my metaphysical and psychoanalytic approaches to investigating the ambiguous mind, thought processes and the recursive nature of fear. I have drawn on discourses by Bergson and Deleuze for my commentary around transitioning between psychical and physical manifestations of fear. This is followed by an exploration of Kristeva’s theory of the abject to highlight the subversive terrain of the ‘in-between’. Thus as a metaphor for unnameable frailty or want, which is to be faced and overturned, then acknowledged in its indispensability, I spit out my own phobia through the process of spontaneous thinking, making and becoming. My thesis accompanies a set of drawings that are made with combination of unassuming and conflicting materials; charcoal, shellac, paper and aluminium, in order to achieve unusual or unexpected phenomena that perturb mundane thoughts. Through the repetitive process of (de)activating the materials’ natural properties, I ultimately experience a contemplative state of mind that embraces transcendental memories. In this arena I explore the possibility of art making as a pathway to understanding the self. I have gained a deeper understanding about my practical processes in the studio, and the prevailing psyche that motivates, drives and informs my art. Hence, this research has allowed me to explore what has been overlooked in the continuum of my daily life, and to revisit things that were sacrificed over the course of obedience to social or cultural standards, values and conventions. Furthermore, my investigation around the process orientated approach to creative work has reassured me of the liberating force and cathartic potential of making art.
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ItemAestheticised violence: images of distant suffering( 2012)These images are the icons of the contemporary political theology that dominates our collective imagination. These images draw their power, their persuasiveness from a very effective form of moral blackmail. After so many decades of modern and postmodern criticism of the image, of mimesis, of the representation, we feel ourselves somewhat ashamed by saying that such images of terror or torture are not true, not real (Grois 2008, p. 125). This thesis is an exploration and questioning of the aestheticisation of violent imagery. It examines the structure of ‘issue’ and ‘response ‘as a way of tracking the image from the event to its representation. It is the image that is documented, and paid for by suffering. The uneasy truth is that these images are real and discussed from a distance, which I join, as a stranger looking at another stranger’s suffering. The first part of the thesis, Issues, explores the image connected to suffering and possible overuse in popular culture. A predominant concern is that the habitual looking perhaps causes responses of otherness and alienation. With empathy to distant suffering linked to technology, proximity and lack of context the image, the case studies in this thesis deal with possible latencies in the communication of trauma. The second part of the thesis examines social responses of avocation, activism, denial and responsibility. The emotional and cognitive responses are analysed via mainstream media representation and the reciprocal relationship to images of suffering in art. Theorising the influence of aestheticisation to an image, I question if it is enough to promote a deeper understanding or if it only provokes a shallow, detached, habitual response. My Masters project, discussed in the final chapter, was built upon disparate violence to flatten the images, by removing distance and sub-context. photographic images. Employing my own distancing techniques, I used aestheticization, stylis I consider the presentation of the aestheticisation of violence as a way to engage, represent and retell through art by invented language, exchange and voice. The collage narrative of global news, photography and personal history allowed my Masters project to exaggerate moral and physical distance. Represented in the form of Stop Animation and Works on Paper, the fragments of fact and fiction facilitated otherworldly perspectives. I have hypothesised the viewer’s imagination from the function of photography, as an act to the photographer’s intention. Through the meditations of Vilém Flusser (2000), I recognise the camera as a tool becoming a kind of human apparatus to produce an image as a piece of culture flattening or obscuring reality. The bewildering ‘normalising’ of imagery comes from a habit of looking, allowing misinterpretation and juxtaposition to manifest a kind of ‘disturbance’ visualisation. I delve into the uneasiness I felt while correlating material for this research.
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ItemCasting an ensemble of objects: producing objects within a post-medium specific 'photographic' logic( 2012)This practice-led research project investigates the potential of an evolving relationship between photography and sculpture. The aim is to expand photographic discourse through the production of a cast ensemble of objects, within a post-medium specific ‘photographic’ logic. That is, a post-medium specific understanding of ‘photography’ that is not solely contingent on a photograph, as a material host, but rather, generative of sculptural objects in relation to images. The paper explicates a series of conditions or relationships, which can be seen as ‘photographic’, based on the photographic mediums facilities to reproduce, copy and multiply – as the principal impetus in not only the production, but also the presentation and perception of objects within the gallery space. A trajectory that originated from correlations made between the sculptural technique of moulding and casting to the technical production of photographic images. A lineage is drawn through a culture of copying pictures and images, commonly associated with appropriation art, and more specifically, the ‘Pictures Generation’, as a means to position the production of cast replica objects within a ‘photographic’ logic. Subsequently, links are made between the presentation and display of ‘sculpture’ within framing mechanisms, which includes the gallery space as a framing device, as a process of ‘image’ production and composition. And lastly, the paper considers our perception of everyday objects, in relation to images of the mind or memories as ‘psychologised objects’. Positioning replica objects as physical ‘ghosts’, which embody the absent object, they were reproduced from – as a conflated object image. The paper contextualises these processes, which form the parameters for the practice-led research, within a theoretical argument, leaving the greater ‘meaning’ of the work open-ended. The exhibition presents a series of recognisably commonplace replica objects, as a cast ensemble of interrelated yet discrete sculptural objects. The works are arranged and displayed predominantly on the floor of the gallery space, or on other objects, which act as host structures for display.