Download files
Abstract
Living with two cultures can be like living with the proverbial elephant in your living room. In my case, being born in Sydney and never having visited the country of my parents' origin, it feels more like living with Wittgenstein's rhinoceros. Except that my rhinoceros is a bison. What is this living, breathing beast of an ancestry, this culture, this sometimes palpable sense of history? How real is it? Is it really there? Is whether or not it is there relevant? Is it itself relevant? How do you, and how can you interact with it? How do you grapple with these questions surrounding its ontology, especially when they are so closely tied to your own sense of being? What impact does it have on how you construct yourself, when the rhinocero-bison that you live with is invisible, when you can only access it through description, when you have no choice but to trust a kooky European philosopher with a quick temper and a thick accent who only refuses to admit that it is not there.
As a child, you embrace this animal for all its mystery, splendour, adventure, majesty, and because through it you feel affirmed, connected, and somehow, perhaps ironically, real. Though as you grow older and learn and understand more and more, you may realise the philosopher, and his mathematician friend, had more tricks up his sleeve, more secrets to hide, than you ever knew. And this animal may begin to fade like the colour in sun-worn fabric, diminish in depth and presence like an evaporating puddle. It may begin to resemble a ghost of something that may have never even been, little more than some kind of benevolent phantom that the light passes right through, leaving only the feint whisper of a shadow. But is this because it is no longer real, or you no longer believe in it? Is it because you can now see through the romantic notions you attached to it as a child? Did it ever even exist, or was its image imprinted on the surface of your childhood rose-coloured glasses? Is it dead? Have you killed it? Can you bring it back to life?
These are some of the questions addressed in my Masters of Fine Arts theoretical and studio research. The body of work presented in conjunction with this exegesis addresses some of my personal experience of the convergence of two worlds and the dilemma of imagination afforded by this convergence, particularly as located in childhood. It investigates some of the properties of this location, and its transmutation over time from something very real and tangible to a memory, and from a memory to a fondly, meticulously preserved fabrication.
This paper serves firstly to provide exegesis for my studio practice. It also touches on recent tendencies in contemporary artistic practices with which my studio research perhaps aligns itself, and certain recent and historical social and cultural phenomena that inform and inspire it. This component of my research provides the secondary impetus for this paper, which is an investigation into some of these tendencies as illustrative of more significant trends in cultural attitudes and the artmaking that reflects them.