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.
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ItemHello, it's me( 2014)My Masters project is an inquiry in to representations of humour and autobiography in contemporary art and how it is used to explore ideas of ambition, ego and the ‘self’. It attempts to understand how art can be used to create what Duchamp describes as a “modus vivendi, a way of understanding life”. By drawing from stories and anecdotes from my personal life I attempt to position my practice alongside other artists whose work is primarily autobiographical in nature and place it within a broader spectrum of art, which includes comedy, literature, graphic novels and film. My investigation is informed by the work of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-part autobiographical novel titled ‘My Struggle’, Austrian author Thomas Bernhard’s novel on the nature of genius ‘The Loser’ as well as the work of artist Paul McCarthy, comedian Andy Kaufman and MAD Magazine’s Alfred E. Neuman. The creative works consist of sculpture, text based work and photography. There is no consistent style, medium or way of working. There is a framed sculptural work, a framed letter, a framed photo, a triptych of plastic bags, a woodcarving, a silicone sculpture, a resin sculpture, a rug, and sculpture made of empty beer cans.
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ItemPhotography's material medium( 2014)Photography’s Material Medium explores the way technological developments in image production can extend the potential for photography to open up as a material and a medium. In the studio-based component of this project, generative processes were developed in order to explore and exploit particular material and plastic properties of current photographic production methods. Industrial and by-hand processes of cutting and slicing were applied to portrait photographs that had been printed onto various surfaces. These cut-up images were then reconfigured in a variety of ways, including montages and fully threedimensional sculptures. In the final body of work created during the two years of this research project, photographic aspects intersect with the more material concerns of texture, form and structure. The human figure is a constant presence oscillating between almost complete realization and total annihilation. Faces scatter into pieces and then regroup, becoming fully threedimensional objects; objects that can balance themselves on geometric shapes—ideal forms—or simply stand on the floor. This work endeavours to expand the discursive and material capacities of photography through an engagement with the physical properties of printed photographs. The written dissertation locates my practice within a wider field of artistic discourse and outlines the technological and cultural shifts that have enabled photographs to become newly ‘visible’ to artists as a material medium. I examine some of the ways contemporary artists use photographic material in a fully dimensional manner, creating works that present a revitalized, reconfigured form of photographic practice, whereby a material engagement with photography can speak to both the particulars of our contemporary situation, as well as to the broader concerns that compel artists to make work. The phenomenon of artists working with photographs in a dimensional manner is not unique to our present time. Artistic practices incorporating multidisciplinary approaches to generating work emerged during the 60s and 70s. This led a number of artists to begin to work with photographic material in ways that sat outside of the usual photographic conventions of their time. I discuss a number of works from this period with a view to tracing historical precedents for a contemporary engagement with photographic materiality and demonstrate how my work extends on these historical precedents.
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ItemYou and me: models of self-representation in participatory culture( 2014)This research project examines personal identity and its relationship to social media. The new genre of mass self-portraiture - the ‘Selfie’ – is a particular focus and how social media platforms encourage an increasingly standardised model of self-representation. The thesis also examines how participants in digital consumer culture become both the subject and object of the production cycle. The thesis proposes that ideologies served to consumers through traditional and social media, empowered by advancing technologies and driven by market forces, become referents for new models of self-representation. Computer logic imposed on the participants of social media interfaces informs their behaviour, while the awareness of persistent observation also induces an ever-performing self. Artists such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Barbara Krueger and Gustave Courbet - and their approach to identity, representation, and the interrelatedness of subject and object - are examined in the context of today’s participatory culture. The thesis observes identity’s new status as commodity in the data-driven information economy as participants engage in their cultural production. The Typecast works presented in the exhibition examine the phenomenon of the ‘Selfie’ image, and how mediated ideologies and technological limitations inform a mirroring of the ‘real’ and the ideal on the shared online stage of social media. The series of small-scale, square format, black and white digital prints mounted onto timber backing boards, each with a mirror mounted in the back, is installed (predominantly in profile) to the gallery wall. The text-based works describe, using the language of the screenplay, new emerging conventions of poses and gestures common to many ‘Selfie’ images. Alongside these works is a neon sign mounted to the wall, which reads ‘YOU AND ME AND YOU AND ME.’ Its medium is listed as ‘Neon, an indeterminate number of viewers,’ indicating that the artwork is not complete until observed by one or more viewers. The work refers to the increasingly interdependent and ambiguous roles of consumer/producer, subject/object, performer/ audience that are emerging in participatory culture.
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ItemShifting roles: the embodied edges of performance-enhancing art practice( 2014)This research project utilises movement practices from dance and sport as material to generate processes for art-making. It extends an interdisciplinary engagement between art and dance, commencing with the Bauhaus, through to contemporary performance art. By training his amateur body with these disciplines’ conditioning-techniques, the researcher prepares for active self-inclusion in the artwork. The project seeks to problematise the conventional roles of artist, viewer and performer through experiments in framing all as moving human bodies, including invited professional practitioners.
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ItemRuin gazing: catastrophe and ruins in painting( 2014)This practice‐led research investigates philosophical and aesthetic ideas surrounding ruins in painting. The significance of the cult of ruins in European culture and American postmodernism underpin the theoretical and practical components of this research project. The ruin is a compelling and sustaining interest for me as it depends on both the projection of a utopia and the decay or collapse of that visionary world into dystopia. This project addresses questions presented by new ruins that have not had time to collaborate with, or integrate themselves into, nature. What does the modern ruin rotting in the urban landscape of the twenty‐first century mean? Why is there a fascination with ruins and collapse in contemporary art? I propose that the attraction of ruins as a subject has increased in the twenty‐first century after the events of 9/11 (catastrophe) and the collapse of modernism (decay). The convergence of these two ‘events’ has confronted contemporary artists with a proliferation of modern ruins. Subsequently, this artistic fascination has prompted a revision of historical ruin aesthetics and its extrapolation into a new version of ruin lust. The practical component of this research involves the production of two correlative groups of paintings based upon photographic references and digital compositions. These imagine the artificial ruins of the human body and architecture to comment on the dystopian inflection of contemporary urban space and the failure of modernism to deliver on its utopian promise. The outcome is an exhibition of paintings selected from a series of derelict interiors and Head Case Study portraits made over the course of this project. In turn, this dissertation compliments these works by addressing the visual characteristics of different types of ruins and the multivalent responses that these differences inspire in art and aesthetic theoretical discourse. The mutable and metaphorical nature of ruins is explored as a key quality that has influenced artistic responses to catastrophe and notions of decay since the eighteenth‐century. In conclusion, this research links traces of the past with visions of the future based on the present. The work is metaphorical, a synthesis of history, reality and fantasy using the ruin as the fulcrum upon which the project turns. Like the artists I have referenced, my work adopts the visual language of ruin aesthetics to address the subject of modern ruins and to speculate upon the philosophical implications of ruination in the twenty‐first century.
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ItemAsking for trouble: collaboration and constraint as a generative method( 2014)This research project is a practice-led exploration of the employment of collaborative and constrained working methods as a strategy for producing paintings. Taking cues from the approach deployed by Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth in the 2003 documentary film The Five Obstructions, as well as methods invented and adopted by members of the French literary group the Oulipo; this research investigates the utility of collaboration and generative constraints for the teasing out of new possibilities from the conventions of painting. The core studio project is a series of still-life paintings for which collaborators were enlisted to create objects that became the subject matter of each painting. I aim to draw upon the experience of tackling each of these specifically restricted projects to elucidate the value of this working method as well as the ramifications for the reception and interpretation of paintings made in this way. This research applies to painting the Oulipian idea that arbitrary constraints can stand in for a traditional concept of inspiration and posits that they also have an inherent capacity to add unpredictability to the results. This written dissertation will situate the work within the broader context of collaborative and constrained art making and consider the implications of such methodologies on the concepts of authorship and interpretation. An exhibition of paintings will represent the component of the research undertaken in the studio. The paintings will be in oil and acrylic on aluminium composite panel and will be the results of the collaborative and constrained working methods elaborated upon in the dissertation.
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ItemPerformance, ritual and transformation( 2014)The thesis, supported by accompanying works (live performance, performance for camera and installation), concerns the role of ritual in performance: culturally, historically, and from a contemporary practice perspective. The research has been divided into two parts: investigation of the power of transformative performance through my own practice, and through the research documented in this paper. The research culminated in a variety of first-hand experiences, including attending performance events, meditation and yoga courses, and research of archival material. The research is concerned with performance as a means for transformation through the agencies of time, endurance, environmental conditions and cultural practices. Locating the origin of contemporary transformative performance in ancient ritual and cultural and religious rites, I draw a direct lineage between them, and explore this within my practice as well as the practices of artists who employ these elements. Studio research has used my body, the bodies of other participants, architectural space, objects and the colour grey to map boundaries and thresholds, and the ideological and physical space between–referred to as the “grey area”. The written component explores current concerns within contemporary performance practice and issues surrounding re-performance, archiving, documentation and presentation. The performance, installation, and photographs that accompany this paper will be presented in my assessment.
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ItemHistory trace loss( 2014)History, Trace, Loss investigates impermanence and mortality, emotional responses to death, and what might happen when we die. The works combine objects, photography and architectural space with projected video to evoke a sense of absent presence and the otherworldly. The dissertation situates the practice within art historical and contemporary art traditions - particularly superimposition and projection - and considers the relationship of visual technologies in conjuring otherworldly visions.
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ItemBeauty and the abattoir: viewing industrial slaughter through the lens of beauty( 2014)Working primarily with photography throughout a two-year self-initiated residency and work placement in a local Melbourne abattoir, my research explores the potential for beauty to lend greater visibility and value to events and processes that are regularly concealed or segregated from social life. Beauty is deployed in photographic works of abattoir workers and meat as a means to unveil and question the relationship between visual aesthetics, social visibility and moral acceptability. By subverting dominant ideals relating to beauty, I attempt to visualise a more complex appreciation for the physicality of labour, human relationships and animal lives within the dehumanising space of an industrial slaughterhouse. This written dissertation will contextualise these creative works alongside the work of other artists such as Richard Mosse, Diane Arbus, Mierle Laderman Ukeles and Santiago Sierra. Through analysing a number of art works that give representation to the undercurrent of dirt, death, suffering and violence within human life, I reveal how my own work contributes to and deepens the link between beauty, value and moral understanding in contemporary art. The writing of Susan Sontag further informs a discussion of the ethics surrounding aesthetic representations of suffering, from the concurrence of torture and salvation in iconic religious imagery, to more recent photographic documentations of war. Drawing upon compositional techniques and aesthetics from the history of painting, I analyse the use of beauty as a strategy that encourages looking throughout historical and contemporary contexts.