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(2001)ThesisThe dissertation proposes that the engagement of spatial illusion within the surface of the paintings of Edouard Manet (1832-83) was a critical dimension to their artifice and ambiguity. Rather than being created arbitrarily or formed in error, it was the result of two intentionally applied spatial strategies which, paradoxically, were anchored within the conventions of linear perspective. This use of a coherent system to structure the ambiguity which has always been thought to have no rational explanation, created a new pictorial and surface coherence. One strategy involved the spatial shaping provided by offset one-point perspective viewpoints, in which the geometry is part of a frontal view but the view itself seems angled, and the other strategy involved the creation of composite images with the synthesis of separate parts of actual views. Photography was directly involved in both of these strategies, with the chambre photographique 'view' camera providing the means to produce images with offset viewpoints, and evidence that many of the views in the composite images were most likely derived from photographs. Additionally, in two of his paintings some of the segments could only have been from aerial photographs taken from a balloon. A research program of spatial analysis and identification, utilising computer-generated modelling, has resulted in proposals for Incident in a Bullfight (1864), View of the 1867 Exposition Universelle (1867), The Burial (1867?), TheRailway(1873), Masked Ball at the Opera (1873-74), and A Bar at the Folies-Bergere (1881-82). The program and the proposals are presented in the relevant historical, theoretical and comparative contexts. An important aspect of the perception that the work of Manet brought about a decisive change in painting involved the shift in the dynamic between pictorial space and surface. Although the approaches to this aspect taken by scholars such as Clement Greenberg, T.J. Clark and Michael Fried have provided a cogent discourse for comparison, the proposals made in this dissertation suggest that their conclusions, together with other perceptions of Manet's picture-making process, need to be re-assessed.
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(2018)ThesisIn this thesis and through my creative practice I argue for a situated listening that draws upon the Aboriginal idea of ‘Listening to Country’ through song practice. It is based upon a model of listening that extends beyond audibility, to sub-audible energies and vibrotactile phenomena and, thus, suggests a more complex and grounded notion of sound, perception and a connection to the environment. It challenges the compartmentalization of the dominant euro-centric sensorium where sound has become something that can be easily quantified, recorded, reproduced, stored and disseminated through technological means and attenuated by digital media practices. Sound and listening is instead situated energetically, perceptually, corporeally, and environmentally, enmeshed with place and culture through practices connecting human to non-human bodies and entities. My creative practice is derived from my experiences and collaborative work with Aboriginal communities in song practices evincing a very deep, connection to 'Country' developed through highly trans-sensory attention and activation of place, and iterative through time unimaginable in Western cultures. Based upon these extended modalities I propose a de-colonizing critique of the euro-centric concept of sound and listening that is developed through my creative practice.
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(2018)ThesisThis study examines how three contemporary art photographers, Sophie Ristelhueber, Simon Norfolk and Luc Delahaye, critically engage with the history, conventions and functions of representations of war. All three image-makers have established reputations in the international art world. Commentators have also placed their work under the recently coined rubric of ‘aftermath’ or ‘late’ photography that responds to military conflicts. Arriving days, months or years after battle has ceased to photograph traces of war and the destructive effects left behind, this ‘late’ mode of war photography is often contrasted with the temporal and spatial proximity to action endorsed by the ‘decisive moment’ of photojournalism. My analysis of works by Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye focuses on examples of their practice made in response to military conflicts in the Middle East since the 1990s. These works are briefly contextualised within the historical evolution of war photography, and related to shifts in the conduct and media representations of war in recent decades. Additionally, the study investigates commentaries on aftermath war photography by theorists John Roberts and David Campany, among others. A significant aim of this project is to interrogate assumptions about what constitutes the ‘event’ (of war) that informs the current literature on aftermath war photography. My approach to this topic draws on Jacques Derrida’s theorisation of the divided structure of the ‘event’ as both resistant to representation and necessarily subject to representational translation. It is proposed that works of Ristelhueber, Norfolk and Delahaye reflect this divided structure by simultaneously ‘speaking’ and ‘keeping silent’ about the event of war. Various historical and contemporary aesthetic theories are adapted to explore how each artist confects a degree of conceptual indeterminacy in their works. These theories include Jacques Rancière’s concepts of the ‘pensive image’ and ‘anachronism’, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s eighteenth century thinking of the ‘pregnant moment’ in history painting. It is contended that unlike much contemporary media imagery of war that circumscribes and directs interpretation, the photography addressed in this project delays, fragments or suspends cognitive resolution, thereby offering food for thought about the contentious topic of war.
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(2016)ThesisThis thesis positions Claude Cahun’s plastic objects as a ‘theoretical object” (Bal 1999: 117) that provides a key to reading Cahun’s life and work, including her literary, photographic, and book illustrations. Cahun’s theorisation, production, and use of objects constructs them as agents of social and political action. Reading Cahun’s work through this lens provides the impetus to re-evaluate her oeuvre and her relation to the Surrealists and the broader avant-garde. In particular, this focus provides an opportunity to consider Cahun’s political activism as an important, integrated component of her artistic endeavours. Building on existing literature that has examined Cahun’s photography and performance of her personal identity as blurring established gender categories, this thesis argues the disruption of categories of subject and object provides a useful framework for understanding her wider body of work. Cahun’s work with plastic objects is thus also an extension of her previous literary and photographic works, which explore the notion of Cahun as object. Cahun’s object manufacture spans a crucial period immediately prior to and during the Second World War, in which Cahun participates fully by engaging in resistance activities through the production and distribution of objects of resistance. Ultimately, Cahun herself becomes one of her own objects of resistance, one that speaks a language only other objects will understand.
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(2018)ThesisPresence in the Sublime: an Autoethnographic Account of Practice presents a thick, art based, investigation into the experience of creating Black Square (1915). It makes contributions to the philosophical concept of the Sublime through an articulation and reflection on a scientific understanding of Presence in that context. Both thesis and practice begin with an examination of the event of creating Black Square (1915) itself, which has received remarkably little attention in the literature. Imagining and investigating the affective force of this momentous event has largely been overlooked. The impact that making the artwork had on its two authors bears the hallmarks of both the Sublime and Presence. However, the aesthetic category of the sublime has predominately been theorized in terms of inaccessibility, suspension, or, at the very least, in terms of distance and arrest. While literature in the scientific field of Virtual Reality maintains that presence requires action. Inspired by reports of Presence in the Sublime which seems to have occurred during the painting of Black Square (1915) my research seeks to challenge the apparent conflict between these philosophical and scientific bodies of thought by exploring the potential for an active sublime in the experience of making and operating art objects. The question that drives this research is therefore: can we be present in the sublime? Two methods provide structure for the investigation. These methods support the creative practice and the dissertation in turn. Practice Based Research has recognised strengths in engaging with complex, multifaceted or slippery concepts that resist quantification and generalisation. Autoethnography supports the written component of the thesis and not only recognises the difficulty in maintaining objective distance but goes further to celebrate the researcher as an active and engaged agent in the world. A series of nine performance artworks utilized motorcycles (and one aircraft) to approach the sublime from many directions. Both the apparatus and feelings of presence were documented in an equally broad manner; seeking to triangulate both method and experience. The nature of my findings confirmed that the proposition had to be engaged with by someone who was willing to risk first-hand experience.
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(2019)Thesis‘Vaguely Familiar’: haunted identities, contested histories, Indigenous futures is a practice-led PhD consisting of three creative works and a written thesis, which is intended as a contribution to Australian Indigenous new media theory and practice; a text written ‘by and for’ Aboriginal artists, not just ‘about’ us, following the eminent Aboriginal academic and activist Marcia Langton. My practice-led research develops a methodology of decolonisation which un-stories dominant colonial frameworks and re-Indigenises a critical capacity for creative work. Through responding to personal memory and a politics of resistance, this PhD re-examines identity politics, gender, sexuality and the performance of Aboriginality. My thesis follows a journey across the development of three experimental art works, from re-imaging the colonial archive, to the practice of Indigenous research protocols, to learning to listen to country. My art and my writing draw upon an intimate personal history that is always colliding with colonial history. In each of the three works, I explore points of collision through the collective mediums of photography, soundscape, moving image and sensorial experience. The thesis is written through a critical and creative combination of personal narrative, biography, oral history and deep Indigenous listening, as well as more formal critical analysis. I prioritise Indigenous-derived academic perspectives and methodologies as well as feminist and queer theorists, in order to develop new ways to speak and write from our/my own cultural standpoints and experiences. My methodology aims to Indigenise research through digital media practice: to revitalise our knowledges and practices, to attend to marginalised and dismissed aspects of what counts as knowledge and to produce complex and transformative decolonial forms of knowledge. Broadly speaking, my work aims to reframe research as decolonisation and Indigenisation. An arts-based platform becomes one through which I can claim a space of sovereignty over my own body, in order for me/us to write our own stories. Through this methodology, I provide testimony and bear witness to my research process, as a journey and a discovery of myself that is specific to my identity as a Gamilaraay, Wailwan and Biripi Indigenous new media artist.