School of Art - Theses
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ItemReframing the representation of women in contemporary China with feminism( 2019)Reframe the Representation of Women in Contemporary Chinese Art with Feminism investigates the representations of women from the Cultural Revolution to today. Through a practice-led thesis, the research shows how women are formed through social, cultural, and political ideologies of “ideal female beauty,” and reframes the representation of women in contemporary Chinese art from a feminist perspective through my practice of making and writing about female representations in art. The representation of “ideal female beauty” that are investigated in this research include the propaganda posters during the Cultural Revolution, Chinese neo-classical paintings in the contemporary Chinese market, as well as the social media, selfie culture, and advertising in Chinese popular culture. The different representations of women developed over time reflect the patriarchal aesthetics of women in traditional Chinese Confucianism, the influence of traditional European nude genre painting on representations of woman, Chinese Communist Party’s political ideologies on gender, and consumerism under globalization. As one of the feminist debates around the diversities of nations, culture, and society, I found Chinese conception of feminism as “feminine-ism” has affected theorizing feminist art in Chinese art criticism. This research re-theorizes Chinese feminist art through case studies of contemporary Chinese feminist artists. To reframe the representation of women in contemporary Chinese art, this research includes a feminist criticism of the patriarchal aesthetics of female representation in the contemporary Chinese art market. It also includes a feminist analysis of some Chinese women artists who represent different female forms by using their bodies in their art and the first generation of Chinese feminist artists rather than “feminine-ism artists” that include me to reframe the representation of women by feminism. The study of the representation of women complements my own paintings, photographs, videos, and a short film in which I present the effects of the “invisible ideologies” that shape the dominant idea of “ideal female beauty” through representations of non-therapeutic cosmetic surgery showing how the invisible ideology becomes visible in women’s bodies through cosmetic surgery. I use the female images in my art to challenge patriarchal aesthetics of female beauty, to resist the cycle of producing the representation of women as beautiful objects, and to refuse the stereotypes of women’s art as feminine essence reinforced by Chinese feminine-ism and certain contemporary Chinese art criticism.
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ItemThe anxiety of the relation: the image as prosthetic perception( 2018)This project is concerned with an investigation of the image, and the technical apparatus through which it is produced, as a prosthesis. I develop a thinking of the prosthetic function of the image through a concentrated reading of the writings of Samuel Beckett, in whose work prostheses figure in various guises. My reading of Beckett is developed from his early critical writings on painting and literature, in which he explicitly questions the relationship between the artwork and the world it presumes to capture. This critique is connected to developments in Beckett’s prose work which come to demonstrate a prosthetic logic; which I elaborate here in relation to the use of this term in the work of Jacques Derrida. The image as prosthesis enacts a problematisation of relations implicit in the production and viewing of images: between the body and the world, the eye and the camera, phenomenal experience and its mediation in memory, photography or writing. The creative component of my research takes cues from Beckett’s work, yet seeks to explore how this prosthetic function can operate through different imaging apparatuses, including photography, video, drawing, and installation. This work is motivated by the acceleration of image technologies in the context of everyday life, and their disorienting and alienating effects. In taking cues from Beckett, I explore the way in which an artwork can reveal the prosthetic dimension of perception, and question the conventional positing of subjective experience in the production and viewing of images.
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ItemSculpture as activating object( 2019)The practice-led project Sculpture as Activating Object, which has developed over three years, 2015-2018, investigates how a sculptural object activates a process of transformation through play. Sculpture activating describes how the process itself becomes the artwork. Through the investigation of three artwork case studies produced for this project, this thesis examines the different outcomes generated by the art objects and speculates that sculpture as activating object is a new category within the field of contemporary action-sculpture.
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ItemThe Bosnian case: art, history and memory( 2018)The Bosnian Case: Art, History and Memory concerns the representation of historic and traumatogenic events in art through the specific case of the war in Bosnia 1992-1995. The research investigates an aftermath articulated through the Freudian concept of Nachträglichkeit, rebounding on the nature of representation in the art as always in the space of an "afterness". The ability to represent an originary traumatic scenario has been questioned in the theoretics surrounding this concept. Through The Bosnian Case and its art historical precedents, the research challenges this line of thinking, identifying, including through fieldwork in Bosnia in 2016, the continuation of the war in a war of images.
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ItemMiranda Must Go: Rethinking the generative capacities of critique, discomfort and dissensus in socially engaged and site responsive art( 2018)This PhD research is situated within the expanded field of public and socially engaged art. Such art practices employ participation, dialogue, community engagement and site- responsive activities to stimulate reflection and action on the present social order. This study is concerned with examining the strategies and methods that socially engaged artists employ when responding to conflict and tension encountered in the social field. Prominent advocates in this field, such as Grant Kester, have championed a socially engaged art that ameliorates social conflict by producing consensus-building, collaborative engagements and concrete social outcomes—such as an increase in community cooperation and cohesion. Attending this argument is a belief that contemporary artists should move beyond a detached, superior position of critiquing or problematising the social in their work and instead engage communities in constructive dialogue that seeks to formulate actual solutions to society’s problems. Against this view, this research explores socially engaged art’s capacity to stimulate trouble and critical reflection, contributing to social change by providing spaces to collectively confront and debate divisive problems that are overlooked and have no straightforward resolutions. Informed by theory and artistic strategies concerned with critique and disagreement’s generative capacity to stimulate bad affects and foment dissensus, this study draws on theorists such as Claire Bishop, Sara Ahmed and Jacques Rancière in order to rethink what a valuable artistic engagement with the social could constitute. Specifically, if we are to accept that deeply entrenched antagonisms and conflicts are irreducible social facts that should not be smoothed over, suspended or elided, how should a socially engaged artist negotiate tensions and divisions encountered in the social field? Furthermore—and as recent theorists such as Ahmed have contended—if vocal disagreement, refusal and discomfort are a transformative resource for a politics of social justice, how should the practical effects of critique, negation and troubling affects in socially engaged art be conceptualised? This study is significant as it contributes to socially engaged art discourse by reappraising the transformative effects and political importance of critical methods, examining how such approaches might be mobilised in the expanded field of socially engaged and public art. It does so primarily through a discussion of practice-led artistic research undertaken at Hanging Rock in Victoria, Australia, that culminated in the major artistic output of this research. The subsequent work produced, Miranda Must Go, was a conceptual campaign that made a decisive critique of the habitual, unthinking associations with a white vanishing myth at the iconic location. The work did not seek to reconcile tensions at Hanging Rock, but instead sought to productively animate them: enlarging what could be thought and felt about the site and provoking a collective review of the stories told there.
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ItemPrivate experiences in public spaces: "Technologies of the self" within video-based confessional art and its relationship to subjectivity( 2018)This practice-led research project examines the notion and prevalence of our contemporary confessing society and its impact on, and relationship to, the visual arts. More specifically, it examines a contemporary confessional art practice that utilises video-based performance. The research examines how Michel Foucault’s philosophical notions of the self can be appropriated and mobilised in a contemporary confessional video art practice. The research also discusses how Foucault extended his philosophical approach to subjectivity and truth through the examination of how the human subject fits into certain ‘truth games’ in scientific practices of control. These preoccupied Foucault’s later work regarding the technologies of the self. By turning to antiquity, Foucault demonstrates how the discourse surrounding Greco- Roman rituals of technologies of the self – and their relation to ‘truth games’ – could be conceived as a potential practice of self-formation for the subject, rather than a purely coercive practice. Through an extension of Foucault’s reworking of power, my research frames contemporary confessional discourse as a less coercive and regulatory practice, by establishing a dialogue between technologies of the self and a contemporary confessional video art practice. As the boundaries between private and public space become increasingly problematised in our confessional society (for example, on Instagram, the blogosphere and Facebook), my research posits that contemporary confessional video art gives voice to displaced subjectivities that challenge coercive mechanisms of heteronormative public spaces to present a more complex politics of self.
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ItemHow we live now: The place of class and taste in contemporary Australian art( 2018)This practice led research has explored the various ways taste (with its implicit relationship to class) has manifest itself as a type of cultural marker, sending a series of complex and coded messages to its audience. With a focus on a local, Australian contemporary and historical culture, the research exerts that the talismans of 21st century taste inhabit a psychic space, a complex matrix of subliminal and latent cultural ideas, implicitly understood by both artist/producers and their audiences/consumers. Themes and motifs present in the paintings are examined and hypothesised as exemplifying this condition, simultaneously offering the superficial comfort of naïve recognition and a deep,reflective cultural discourse. The research finds that a middle–class hegemony permeates not only the fields of reception and production, but unlike other creative disciplines in Australia, the visual arts are reluctant to engage directly with these issues. It also finds that the process of aestheticisation, once the domain of the creative arts is now embodied in all aspects of middle–class culture, best seen through its hagiographic treatment of food and foodism.
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ItemThe kraken’s reach: manipulating subjectivity through dissociative play( 2018)The research considers the role of dissociation in manipulating subjectivity by examining its influence upon 'dissociative play'– a generative method where thought, feeling, action and production are undertaken within multiple dissociated fictional subjectivities. Central to the thesis is a question surrounding the workability of this practice in a contemporary visual arts setting dominated by static unitary self-representational modes. The paper distinguishes dissociative play from existing fictive and deceptive self-representational strategies in the visual arts that share surface similarity, and asserts that dissociative play differs by its reliance on self-deception, a key feature of dissociation that allows for multiple, often contrapuntal positions to be held by the mind. The research finds that the creative manoeuvrability of this state of mind allows it to freely function with limited conscious awareness, separating it by definition and depth of experience from common fictive and imaginative processes. The expediency of a wilfully self-deceptive, dissociative approach in shifting perception, memory, subjectivity and agency pushes hard against dissociation’s negative legacy in pathology. Addressing this issue requires both a reassessment of individual agency in pathological instances and an account of the benefits of dissociation in practice. In bridging pathology and practice, the research argues against the idea that dissociative states are entirely compartmentalised from non-dissociated subjective experience, instead positing that each bleed into the other for the primary benefit of the host. The enquiry reaches into disparate areas to provide evidence of that bleed, drawing from dissociative practices and phenomena in behavioural psychology, acting methodology, auto-fictive literature, heavy metal music and cultural possession - alongside the development of the author’s work creative work Kraken, exhibited at VCA Margaret Lawrence Gallery in February 2018 - to demonstrate that not only is it possible to create within a dissociated mind, but particularly advantageous. It finds that dissociative practices assist in the avoidance of expectation, predilection and self-limitation, and allow artists to work outside their imagined capacity, steered largely by self-initiated hypnotic suggestion and self-deception, and that the generation of novel thoughts, feelings and actions from within a dissociated consciousness have the capacity to translate into seemingly autonomous and unlikely outcomes, affecting practitioners, audiences, and generated material.
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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.