School of Art - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 5 of 5
-
ItemAboriginal art: creative responses to assimilation( 2003)This thesis argues that the interpretation of significant aspects of Aboriginal art. especially the movement. Urban art - here renamed Revolutionary art - in the light of the effects of assimilation, breaks new ground. This approach reveals common characteristics and themes, which reflect an interest in shared histories, cultural heritage, and individual and communal directives. In the broader sense it points to fresh ways of unraveling and understanding the Aboriginal collective experience. The thesis begins with an analysis of the history of the approach to Aboriginal art, examining in particular, the convergence of anthropological and art historical frameworks, which contributed to the interpretation of Aboriginal art throughout the last century. An analysis of assimilation and its effects in relation to artist Albert Namatjira (1902-1959) follows, together with an examination of the categorisation and thematic approaches of Urban or Revolutionary artists. The analysis of the historical approaches to Aboriginal art of Namatjira's world, and of the issue of categorisation and its relationship to the themes of Revolutionary art, from the perspective of assimilation, is complemented and expanded in three specific case studies, which demonstrate individual and collective creative responses to assimilation. The artworks of Leslie Griggs (1958-1993) were produced between 1984 and 1989; a short, yet important period for the artist. Griggs used art as a medium to give voice to his experience of enforced separation from his family as a consequence of assimilation processes. Removed at the tender age of two years, Griggs grew up in the environment of the institution, separated from the Gunditjmara cultural heritage and people to which he belonged. Art was to become the vehicle through which he could later establish cultural and personal reconnection with this background. The artworks of Another View Walking Trail, 1994-1995, provide an opportunity to study a collective response to the silencing processes of assimilation. Since their installation in 1995, Another View artworks have undergone certain changes. Natural damage caused by environmental conditions, workplace accident and vandalism, have contributed to this. This thesis analyses the original and complete works of Another View in the condition they were in at time of installation. It also discusses the implications relating to the censorship of several of the artworks originally planned for the project. The artworks of Lin Onus (1948-1996), an artist deeply conscious of the need to respond to his sense of loss caused by assimilation processes, reveals a different creative response from that of Griggs. Onus reaches out to another Aboriginal group for cultural sustenance. He chooses an assimilatory experience of his own, inspired by the desire to revitalise his creative work and life by his adoption into the Yulungu family of Jack Wunuwun. Onus's art developed alongside a heightened consciousness of the duality of life in relation to cultural traditions and contemporary cultural contexts. This thesis studies a selection of paintings and sculptures by the artist, which demonstrate how conscious re-assimilation of traditional Aboriginal knowledge can assist in a creative response to losses brought about by assimilation. In arguing that the individual, artistic expressions of Leslie Griggs, Lin Onus and the collective, collaborative work of Another View Walking Trail, can be interpreted as creative responses to assimilation, the thesis indicates a positive way forward both in the interpretation of Aboriginal art and in cross-cultural understanding.
-
ItemContested space: an investigation of the structural foundations and historical consequences of conceptualist art practices in Australia, 1968-1988( 2004)This thesis is a broad, interpretative exploration of the structural foundations and historical effects of Australian conceptualism. Combining both historiographic and theoretical perspectives, it traces artists' efforts to challenge art's commodity status and institutional inscription through site-specificity and alternative art contexts, depicting the recent Australian art world as partly produced by struggles over the nature and purpose of art. In investigating these issues, the thesis advances three interrelated arguments. The first contends that although conceptualism has an integral history, the development of the Australian art system precipitated artists' critical interest in established art values, practices, and institutions, especially their concern for the impact of context on artistic meaning. The second contends that the diversity of contemporary exhibition contexts is a historical formation; alongside broad systemic influences their variation is a product of' artists' efforts to critically contest the values and relations artists sought in n reformed art sphere. The third considers the implications or conceptualism's evolving relationship to the main body of the Australian art world, highlighting the capacity of' oppositional art to both reproduce and transform the cultural structures that engendered it. Through these interlinking discussions, my aim has been to investigate the shifting nature and orientation of' radical cultural practice in post-1960s Australian art. While being thematic and issues-based, the five main chapters delineate a distinct sequence of historical developments. Chapter One discusses the necessity of conceptualism in Australian art by connecting it to the significant structural changes that affected the Australian art world from the late 1950s. Chapter Two challenges two pervasive views or conceptualism — that it emerged in the wake of the contemporary climate for social and political change, and that its criticality was compromised by being expressed in the context of the art system. Chapter Three explores how conceptualism initiated institutional change in Australian art, defining its basic trajectory around the semiotics of organisational form. To better understand the context in which conceptualism and the Australian art system evolved, Chapter Four investigates the expansion of arts funding under the Whitlam Labor Government. Chapter Five continues the argument that the diversification of gallery types in Australian art during the 1970s and 1980s was shaped by conflicts over the contextualisation and control of art, using the case of the emergence of artist-run galleries in the late 1970s. Drawing on new social movement theory, the study reappraises the nature of conceptualism's cultural politics, arguing that it exemplified the general struggle against institutional effects in late capitalist society. The thesis represents conceptualism as a logical response to the systemic elaboration of Australian art, identifying local cultural structures and relations as a vital arena for challenge. To this end, the study investigates how site-specificity became a major current in Australian conceptualism, recognising the increasingly diffuse nature of meaning, authority and agency in the contemporary cultural sphere.
-
ItemMaking pictures: Australian pictorial photography as art, 1897-1957( 2001)Pictorialism was the dominant international photographic style from the 1890s until the late 1930s. In this thesis I examine the history of the movement in Australia from its beginnings in 1897, until the late 1950s when it finally faded away. Nineteenth century photographers used the camera to portray 'reality' or 'truth'. Pictorial photographers, who first appeared in Europe in the 1890s, aspired to be known as artists who sought beauty rather than 'truth' in their imagery. However, as an artistic instrument the camera had limitations. The most important of these was the fact that a negative is simply a record of what is in front of the lens; how then could a photographic print be art? Another drawback was the perception, as cheap cameras became widely available at the end of the century, that taking a photograph required little or no talent; 'anyone' could do it. Many Pictorialists therefore aimed to make images that resembled photographs as little as possible. To this end various manipulative devices were employed. The primary focus of my investigation has been to supplement the reasonably well known story of Australian Pictorialists noted for this kind of manipulation, producing soft-focus 'impressionist' hand work, with an account of the achievement of others, working in a 'natural' style, whose history has been neglected. I have also been concerned in this thesis to reclaim the reputations of Pictorialists, both men and women, from the reproach that they were only concerned to imitate works in other media, notably nineteenth century painting. In doing this, I have analysed who took photographs, what their motives were, and what their images signified, paying particular attention to the contextual, institutional, historical, and discursive parameters of Pictorialism. I use an investigative methodology heavily reliant upon contemporary sources, particularly the photographic journals. As well, I examine concepts applied to photography, such as the use of light, and compare them with ideas prevalent within Australian cultural discourse at the time affecting literature, poetry, and the visual arts. In order to do this, I use parallelism, induction, equivalent, and speculative reconstruction where concrete statements of Pictorialist aesthetics are absent. Pictorialism, in Australia as elsewhere, continues to be a relatively neglected area, although interest in an artistic style which has been out of fashion for decades often returns unexpectedly. The revival in the fortunes of Victorian pre-Raphaelite painters in recent years is one striking example. Such considerations apart, I argue that a movement which attracted so many enthusiastic participants, which was distinguished by an eclecticism ignored by most commentators today, which lasted so long, and has been so influential, does not deserve to be forgotten. Its history holds much to interest the serious photographer as well the social historian.
-
ItemExhibiting visual culture: narrative, perception and the new museum( 2002)This thesis maps a recent emergence or shift in museological discourse. It focuses on the moment where the discourses of narrative, cinema, and museums come together visibly and publically in relation to the built environment which hosts them, and the experience they offer. In Australia, this moment may be identified as emerging in 1995 with the Museum of Sydney, reaching a critical mass in 1998 with the developmental plans for the Melbourne Museum, Federation Square, and National Museum of Australia, and reaching its most satisfactory and effective manifestation in 2001, with the opening of the National Museum of Australia. This thesis considers these (and other) museum projects to look at how and why this emergence or shift came about. It is interested more in the processes of development than with the respective outcomes, which it may as yet be too early to evaluate fully. As such, this thesis evaluates the production and reception of recently developed museums that embody this shift. It is concerned with the ways that these developments present themselves rhetorically, architecturally and through their exhibitions, and with the type of experience that they aim to offer visitors. They tend to represent this experience as unique, immersive, and postmodern, and the thesis argues that these museums share a similarity based on their cross-disciplinary approach to self-representation, and other key factors. Because of this, the thesis presents a close exploration of these signifiers of ‘newness’, asking why these are privileged by the contemporary museum, and looking to see whether this trope of newness itself has a historical chronology, or a predecessor in earlier museums. It also looks at how the effect of newness is conceptualized, designed, and produced. The thesis contends that the ‘new’ museum presents itself as being a primarily interdisciplinary institution that is concerned with replicating and developing connections across disciplinary fields, rather than according to an historical chronology. However, despite this denial of historical relationships, the ‘new’ museum’s attention to a conceptual and thematic acuity can itself be historicized. Although the museum is not produced according to concerns for historical or traditional accuracy, the cross-disciplinary focus that it champions as an innovative signifier of its ‘newness’ itself has roots in earlier examples of museums and other cultural experiences (that include reading and cinema-going). As such, the primary historical allegiance that is shared by the cross-disciplinary impulse, and by the museums which champion this, is with early modernity. Characteristics associated with the new technologies and experiences of modernity (from cinema and other technologies, to the Crystal Palace, to new modes of writing and narrative form) are all valued by ‘new’ twenty first century museum projects, and many of the technologies and approaches to textuality that they also present. Locating the origins of cross-disciplinarity at the moment of an emergent modernity, the thesis deconstructs the concepts, specifically privileged by the ‘new’ museums, in order to look at the ways that these concepts also engage with each other, and to consider how and why they have been incorporated into these museum projects at all. In order to do this, the thesis is divided into three sections, ‘Narrative’, ‘Cinema’, and ‘Museums’, with each Part providing a discussion of each discipline in isolation. Part Three, ‘Museums’, looks at ways in which recent museum projects have attempted to combine these discrete areas, and it also contends that the appropriation efforts have varying degrees of success in this activity. (Part abstract)
-
ItemA critical history of writing on Australian contemporary art, 1960-1988( 2005)This thesis examines art critical writing on contemporary Australian art published between 1960 and 1988 through the lens of its engagement with its location, looking at how it directly or indirectly engaged with the issues arising from Australia's so-called peripheral position in relation to the would-be hegemonic centre. I propose that Australian art criticism is marked by writers' acceptances of the apparent explanatory necessity of constructing appropriate nationalist discourses, evident in different and succeeding types of nationalist agendas, each with links to external, non-artistic agendas of nation and politics. I will argue that the nationalist parameters and trajectory of Australian art writing were set by Australian art historian, Bernard Smith, and his book Australian Painting, 1788-1960 (1962) and that the history of Australian art writing from the 1960s onwards was marked by a succession of nationalist rather than artistic agendas formed, in turn, by changing experiences of the Cold War. Through this, I will begin to provide a critical framework that has not effectively existed so far, due to the binary terror of regionalism versus internationalism. Chapter One focuses on Bernard Smith and the late 1950s and early 1960s Australian intellectual context in which Australian Painting 1788-1960 was published. I will argue that, although it can be claimed that Australia was a postcolonial society, the most powerful political and social influence during the 1950s and 1960s was the Cold War and that this can be identified in Australian art criticism and Australian art. Chapter Two discusses art theorist, Donald Brook. Brook is of particular interest because he kept his art writing separate from his theories of social and political issues, focussing on contemporary art and artists. I argue that Brook's failure to engage with questions of nation and Australian identity directly ensured that he remained a respected but marginal figure in the history of Australian art writing. Chapter Three returns to the centre/periphery issue and examines the art writing of Patrick McCaughey and Terry Smith. Each of these writers dealt with the issue of the marginality of Australian art but neither writer questioned the validity of the centre/periphery model. Chapter Four examines six Australian art magazines that came into existence in the 1970s, a decade of high hopes and deep disillusionment. The chapter maps two shifts of emphasis in Australian art writing. First, the change from the previous preoccupation with provincialism to pluralist social issues such as feminism, and second, the resulting gravitation of individual writers into ideological alliances and/or administrative collectives that founded, ran and supported magazines that printed material that focused on (usually Australian) art in relation to specific social, cultural or political issues. Chapter Five concentrates on the Australian art magazine, Art & Text, and Paul Taylor, its founder and editor. Taylor and his magazine were at the centre of a new Australian attempt to solve the provincialism problem and thus break free of the centre/periphery model.