School of Art - Theses
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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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Item'Help a sculpture' and other abfunctional potentials( 2016)This practice-led research investigates the relationship between sculpture and concepts of function in contemporary art. Since the Enlightenment, art and function have commonly been understood as mutually exclusive concepts. Associated with everyday life, function is considered outside the sphere of art, where the art object is predominantly positioned as “functionless” and hence “autonomous” from the everyday prerequisites of living. In the instances where art has incorporated function, this has frequently been framed in terms of dysfunction, “dissolving art into life,” or as an alternative strategy in the “dematerialisation of the art object.” Yet, a neologism that emerged from my own art practice – “abfunction,” meaning to move away from function – implies that function is implicit within art itself, suggesting that the neat separation between art and function is not so clear cut. This thesis, includes the artwork produced for the Help a Sculpture exhibition at the Margaret Lawrence Gallery, VCA in July 2016 and the written dissertation. The project asks: in what ways can the neologism abfunction reveal and divert the role of function within the production and end-effect of the contemporary artwork? Three bodies of artworks were produced for the project and have been used as case studies within the written dissertation. They are: How long (2008-ongoing), Houses that are happy to help with at least one of the possible problems of art (2010-ongoing) and the Hold UP series (2013-ongoing). These artworks comprise: video, photographic installations, photo-sculptures and sculptural assemblies. The written dissertation establishes a foundation for abfunction within contemporary art. Part I seeks to define “function” that abfunction maybe moving away from within the artwork. Given art is considered to be functionless, concepts of function are investigated by Aristotle, early modernist architectural discourse, and those involved in function theory, such as Beth Preston and Ruth Millikan. It is proposed that function can be understood from two points of view. I have termed this as, “use-ready” function (what something is for), and function as “forming” of an object or thing (summarised by the adage: “form follows function”). Part II of the written thesis investigates how these two roles of function occur within art. The Russian and Polish avant-garde from the 1920s to the mid-1930s, provides an uncharacteristic example of artists and theorists activating the role of function in art. Discussed in this written component of the thesis, are artworks and theories from the Russian Constructivists and Productivists, including artists Alexandr Rodchenko, and Karl Ioganson and theorist Boris Arvatov, in addition to the Polish Unists: sculptor Katarzyna Kobro and her husband, painter Władysław Strzemiński. Part III applies the understanding of the role of function in the artwork to investigate how abfunction both reveals and departs from function in the artwork case studies produced for the project. Abfunction represents a significant opportunity for a more complex understanding of how function might operate with the artwork. Its meaning in relation to art is not encompassed by existing terms of function including, functionless, dysfunction, malfunction and the lesser known term para-functional. Moreover, in describing a deviation away from the end expectations of function, abfunction also acknowledges the alternative materialisation of objects and things produced through this method which the terminology associated with the “dematerialised” object fails to do. This research project draws to a conclusion with the argument that abfunction offers a new insight into processes within the production of art. Revelatory in its reveal of the pervasive role of function that it generatively departs from, abfunction accounts for the alternative unimagined outcomes produced in art beyond the teleological grip of function.
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ItemEnd of days: religious imaging in millennialist America( 2016)Michel Foucault once commented that: “Religious beliefs prepare a kind of landscape of images, an illusory milieu favorable to every hallucination and every delirium.”1 This thesis seeks to determine what drives certain contemporary artists to deliver implicitly religious imagery within a ‘secular’ context. Particularly, how religious heritage and language have impacted upon contemporary American culture to partake in an aesthetic of apocalypticism that underwrites it. By analysing contemporary American art and literature, this thesis investigates recent millennial imaging. Filtered through analysis of the work of the sculptor, performance artist and filmmaker Matthew Barney, the author Ben Marcus, the cinema of David Lynch and Christopher Nolan and others, End of days: Religious imaging in Millennialist America scrutinises an aesthetic or sensibility of apocalyptic thinking in contemporary American culture. The thesis argues that this may be characterised as ‘schizophrenic’ — a hyperbolic secularism rancid with chthonic religious imaging. Such imagery, derived from mutational variations of Mormonism, Judaism and Christianity (especially Catholic), articulate a series of translations, transformations, mutations and mutilations of these traditions. The results are near heretical permutations of orthodoxy fixated on apocalyptic imaginings and rendered most vibrantly in these artist’s works. The thesis examines the dialects of pathological America where the end of the world is forever immanent, but never arrives — or has already arrived.
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ItemBeforegreen, extended abstract painting( 2015)This project revisits aspects of Modernist abstract painting in order to extend its possibilities into the twenty-first century. Building on abstraction’s analogous relationship with music, a central focus of the thesis is to reconcile two seemingly incompatible pictorial modes – the poly-modal and the impro-modal – in order to create a new multi-modal form. By expanding painting methods through new digital technologies, the project presents a series of artworks in various media, including multi-modal, animated videos and sound-tracks, which reconsider abstraction and music’s relationship to visual art.
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ItemThe embarrassment of sincerity: the changing state of contemporary figurative painting( 2014)This practice led PhD is concerned with the problems and possibilities of figurative painting. It examines questions of perception and interpretation and interrogates agency and affect in figuration. The thesis comprises an exhibition exploring empathy and a dissertation considering the limitations of the conceptual model and in what other terms painting might be viewed. Considering formal painting language and research linking emotion, sensation and perception, new possibilities in making and viewing are revealed. This comprises the research’s original contribution.
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ItemThe artist and the museum: contested histories and expanded narratives in Australian art and museology 1975-2002( 2004-10)This thesis explores the rich and provocative fields of interaction between Australian artists and museums from 1975 to 2002. Artists have investigated and engaged with museums of art, social history and natural science during this period. Despite the museum being a major source of exploration for artists, the subject has rarely been examined in the literature. This thesis redresses this gap. It identifies and examines four prevailing approaches of Australian contemporary art to museums in this period: oppositional critique, figurative representation, intervention and collaboration. The study asserts that a general progression from oppositional critique in the seventies through to collaboration in the late nineties can be charted. It explores the work of three artists who have epitomised these approaches to the museum. Peter Cripps developed an oppositional critique of the museum and was intimately involved with the art museum politics in Melbourne during the mid-seventies. Fiona Hall figuratively represented the museum. Her approach documented and catalogued museum tropes of a bygone era. Narelle Jubelin’s work intervened with Australian museums. Her work has curatorial capacities and has had real effect within Australian museums. These differing artistic approaches to the museum have the effect of contesting history and expanding narrative within museums. Curators collaborated with artists and used artistic methods to create exhibits in Australian museums during the 1990s. Artistic approaches are a major methodology of museums seeking to contest traditional modes of history and expand narrative in their exhibits. Contemporary art has played a vital, curatorial, role in the Hyde Park Barracks, Museum of Sydney, Melbourne Museum and Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia, amongst other museums. While in earlier years artists were well known for their resistive approach to the art museum, this thesis shows that artists have increasingly participated in new forms of representation within art, social history, and natural history museums. I argue that the role of contemporary art within “new” museums is emblematic of new approaches to history, space, narrative and design within the museum.