School of Art - Theses
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ItemContingent meanings: reframing appropriation in contemporary video installation( 2017)This thesis, which comprises this dissertation together with accompanying creative work, addresses the implications of video and installation on the framing of contemporary appropriation-based artistic practices. This framework utilises a central concept of contingency that is distinguished from discourses of chance in order to focus on questions of meaning and the creative potential of ambiguity. My approach repositions appropriation practice away from gestures of critique and towards more nuanced strategies that extend ambiguity into practicable artistic methods. Accordingly, contingency is positioned as a network of potential from which meaning forms precarious alignments and is accelerated through contemporary conditions of digital exchange. This research identifies instances of contingency in existing video material and further accelerates this contingency through appropriation, reconfiguration and recombination. Digital video offers a vast range of material and potential configurations, presenting the contemporary practitioner with ever-increasing creative opportunities, coupled with increasing pressures of choice and gesture. The contemporary ubiquity of copying and appropriation in digital practice alters the role of these cultural strategies, detracting from their implied gestural quality and positioning the appropriation in a framework of increasingly ambiguous meaning. My approach to this contemporary condition involves positioning my own appropriation practice towards strategies that acknowledge and embrace an inherent uncertainty, and away from previous models that emphasise the importance of criticism and reference. Following this cultural positioning, contingency is presented as the potential for meaning to emerge from situations of uncertainty and the potential of unforeseen occurrences. Within the construction of video works, my strategies of obscuring and removal of reference reduces the emphasis on the act of appropriation itself, instead emphasising the contingencies of assemblage and arrangement. I argue that digital video is an expansive network of media relationships and contingencies of circulation and exchange. Accelerating these processes produces new video works that combine pre-existing video and shape an elusive intentionality and loose association of material. The ambiguities and uncertainties of this contingency approach are given a stable expression through the installation, which differentiates my video assemblages from the flux of their emergence through contemporary circulation. I argue that the experiential capacity of the installation then provides the conditions for meaning to be generated in the context of its encounter. While this establishes the creative potential and relevance of contingency, I also argue that contingency can present potential risks and inherent difficulties of differentiating ambiguity from meaninglessness. My approach balances these conditions through rigorous and reflexive engagement with the materiality of digital video and its installation in which contingency can emerge as meaning. Video documentation of examined exhibition Decomposing Contingencies (2017) is available at https://vimeo.com/230541522 and available as video file.
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ItemEmerging from and disappearing towards dust( 2017)The research investigates the ambiguity of permanence and impermanence using the medium of dust. This is achieved by: considering the relationship between ephemeral art and documentation; identifying the material and poetic possibilities of dust in relation to time; and through the melancholy experience of preservation and loss in the artworks. This thesis articulates the concept of “enduring temporality,” addressing questions about what we seek to preserve compared to what we identify as worthless, and the paradox of experiencing life as perpetual while knowing we will return to dust. The creative works, which form the partial fulfillment of this PhD, include: temporary installations; evolving site-specific works; potentially enduring forms of documentation; performances; and archiving work in human memory. Collectively, these artworks create a complex cloud of associations that drift, gather, and disperse the concepts of durability and temporality, value and worthlessness, and it is concluded from this that they create tensions and ambiguities between these themes. The artworks are themselves a unique kind of research, and the type of knowledge that they contribute is raises questions that are allowed to remain as questions. The written component of the research is a companion to, and conceptual extension of, the artworks. Drawing on the fields of philosophy, science, literature, poetry, and art, it presents five contributions to new knowledge. These include reframing concepts through new terms: dust as an “enduring temporality,” and decoration as mode of ordering and display. Additions to theory and philosophy have also been made through the arguments that documentation can be reframed as a doppelgänger, and that dust provides a way to understand the blurring of the human/non-human binary (as claimed by the philosophic field of New Materialism). It has also been posed that the artworks provide an opportunity to contemplate the value of the quotidian and to reflect on our own fleeting existence.
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ItemForced perspectives: cartoon and The Cult of Reduction( 2016)Commencing with caricature and reductive imaging techniques, this research explores parallel tendencies evident within broader culture. The thesis argues this reductive predisposition became broader and more prominent during Modernism, the digital revolution of the 1990s, and is strongly manifest within various aspects of contemporary art and culture. Theorized as the ‘Cult of Reduction’ this tendency is both a cultural condition, and a studio methodology employed to create two dimensional projected animation and digital prints.