The initial intention of this thesis was to amalgamate two distinct tendencies that evolved in the author's art work over the period of twenty-four years. The illusionary and corporeal qualities of his painting and sculpture had become amalgamated with social concerns, which emerged from his installation and performance work between 1975 and 1985. The moment the artist makes a gesture on a painting surface is a culmination of memory, the immaterial and the corporeal. That moment expresses his judgement about himself, and the world in illusionary form. By bringing together of the self and one's worldview, the corporeal and the immaterial, the past and present, the artist is provided with the authority to make judgements and to change themselves and their surrounding community, as well as gaining insights into changes in values in his community and family. The emphasis of the everyday in the artist's work has become an expression of universal social issues. / Master of Arts (Hons) Contemporary Arts

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 382-386).

This thesis is a sociological exploration of emergent social relations at art exhibition venues. It focuses on the experience of art which the dominant “decoding” metaphor fails to describe conceptually and empirically. To grasp the interactional and emergent character of interaction with art, I constructed a framework that defined audiences as sets of emerging social relations. Building on the concepts of experience (Merleau-Ponty), enchantment (Gell), multiplicity and enactment (Latour, Mol and others), I emphasise the situated and embodied nature of art experience. The study draws on a series of ethnographic observations at the exhibition sites of a number of Moscow art institutions. It is supplemented with unstructured interviews with visitors and art professionals at these venues (artists, curators, wardens etc.). Conceptually, I have suggested a dual social ontology that art establishes in the events of perception. Bringing uncertainty into visitors’ actions, art enables interactions in which visitors establish meanings, and leads to practices that make their art experience organized and less problematic. The thesis examines the ways art experience becomes stable through meaning-making events supported by socio-material relations. These relations enable participants to produce recognizable actions. The process of meaning-making at the exhibitions is seen not as a direct communication of pre-given aesthetic meanings (as the decoding perspective would assume), but rather is understood as consisting of multiple instances of micro-level discoveries which mediate an “enchanting” form of art experience. Enchantment engenders the social relations of expertise which visitors practically achieve in their interaction with material objects and through performances of meaningfully recognizable actions. T Though the study mainly focuses on the experience of interactive art installations, I argue that the conceptual considerations and empirical results are relevant to the experience of other forms of art. The thesis is intended to make a contribution to the so-called “new sociology of art”, not just by subjecting the dominant Bourdieu-inspired assumptions about “decoding” to critique, but also by pointing out the conceptual limits of much of the new sociology of art, and pointing towards new conceptual horizons for sociology’s ongoing encounter with matters artistic.

A critical culture requires that the site of appearance, the temporal coincidence of the subject, the object and the site, be acknowledged as a ground for meaning. Through a built investigation and a theoretical address this thesis examines the site of appearance for contemporary creative practice; the extent to which it continues to be defined by and contained within the conceptual frame of the Enlightenment aesthetic as the privileged discourse of the object. In a detailed analysis of the architecture of the exhibition, the 18th century Academy Salon and the Parisian bourgeois hotel are juxtaposed with examples from the late 20th century practice of site-specific exhibition. This comparison reveals an essential connection between art and architecture, between architectural form and social representation. An alternative concept of the exhibition as a site of appearance thereby acknowledges individual, temporally specific interpretation as a potential ground for critical discourse within the contemporary art institution.

This creative project entailed the creation and display of ten drawings. These drawings were to be the result of research into the lives and artistic styles of a number of visual artists who explored political and social themes. The goals of the artist of the creative project were to develop and extend her ability to produce a personal visual language, to communicate by way of her drawings certain feminist and social concerns, and to relate her treatment of the drawn figure to the treatment other artists have traditionally given these concerns.Within the context of the ten drawings submitted for this creative project, it became clear that the artist had begun to develop a personalized visual language. The human figures were indicated by outlines which suggested the three dimensional form in a manner that was distinctive to the artist while fitting into the realm of contemporary feminist and political art. Furthermore, these drawings described the humanist/feminist concerns of the artist. / Department of Art

"This research project aims to provide a contemporary visualisation of "specific sites." The visualisation of these selected landscapes will draw upon and add to existing traditions of representation of this region, embedding my experiences within this dialogue." / Master of Arts (Visual Arts)

What is belonging? What does belonging mean as lived experience? What happens when displacement disrupts belonging as solid given? / I investigate these questions from my unstable position as displaced cultural 'other', as artist, as woman and as city dweller. Personal memories, dreams and the experience of reality form threads of reference that are akin to Walter Benjamin's notion of memoirs, rather than being an autobiographical chronology. / I question how a sense of belonging may be instilled, maintained, lost, achieved, resisted; how a sense of otherness may develop, persist, (re)surface. Do migrants merely amplify a universal dilemma? My position as migrant is a complex interweaving of presence and absence, developed gradually over time as a result of a wide range of factors, including the abiding effect of early childhood experiences. I focus on geography and language as central to the experience of cultural displacement and move between ambivalent positions and the seemingly solid territories of authoritative theories. / The structure of the thesis reflects these complexities. It is a psychogeographical mapping of several journeys in one, like a Deleuzian rhizome route system, or Debordian dérive, or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls a mêlée. As methodology I draw on these theories to bring together complexities, by interweaving experience, practice and theory. / The thesis comprises art works and a written exegesis. Drawings, photos, maps and other artwork intersperse with writing; artefacts include text, maps, knitting and series of images that document walking projects. I link walking to uttering, to language and the telling of stories. I explore the complex dilemmas of translation, of language as loss, contained as interiority and language as appropriated, claimed from without. Both exegesis and studio work form part of a process that is expressive, while situated within a critical context. / I argue the validity of ambivalent belonging, formed and maintained in transient connections between fragmented aspects of experience, while keeping open the potentiality of ongoing change. This research into the meaning of belonging is full of intuitive beginnings and remains open ended. / Thesis (PhDVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2005.

Painting, central to Western art for many centuries, became problematised to an unprecedented degree in the 1960's. From the early 1970's, many Western artists abandoned its forms and traditions and embraced alternative forms. However, painting returned, and it remains the medium of choice for many artists. Painting in the post-modern era of art differs from that of the modernist era. The reconsideration of painting was apparent internationally and throughout Australia. / In South Australia, painting began to change significantly around 1970, and this change had some unique local characteristics. In this thesis, I describe the change in painting in South Australia and identify the main themes and innovations that characterised it by examining the work of important painters working in South Australia in the period c1970 to 2003. While South Australian art has been strongly influenced by Australian and Western artisitic trends, these trends have manifested themselves locally in characteristic ways - shaped, for example, by local and national politics, a strong feminist movement, the role of government-funded exhibition spaces, and an active art press, as well as prominent local practitioners. / This thesis takes the form of an overview rather than an in-depth analysis of all painting in South Australia in this period. It identifies some of the main artists and many of the main themes but is not intended as an exhaustive description, which would be beyond the scope of such a thesis. The intention is to provide a broad historical picture that identifies the forms, styles and characteristics of the painting that developed and the context in which it developed in this important three-decade period. This historical picture will serve as a framework for further analysis of specific art and artists, and it provides a basis for the assessment of painting at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The thesis builds on and draws into the historical picture some existing literature on South Australian painting. / South Australia is chosen for this study partly because of its unique characteristics and partly because there are some significant South Australian artists whose work is under-acknowledged. In Australian art history, the emphasis is traditionally on developments in Sydney and Melbourne. This thesis shows that South Australian painting since the 1970s has been important and is worthy of consideration. / Chapter 1 briefly outlines the nature of South Australian modernism at the end of the 1960s. Chapter 2 details the revolution in South Australian painting of the 1970s: the changed political, educational and institutional environment for art, the rejection of painting in favour of alternative forms, and the politicisation of painting's subject matter. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 outline the impetus for the return to painting in South Australia, the development of post-modern painting in the 1980s and 1990s, and the principal concerns and attributes of the new painting. Chapter 6 briefly looks at South Australian Aboriginal painting, whose nature differed from that of the Northern Territory, but which has had a nationally significant impact. Chapter 7 examines a sample of the work of emerging painters around 2000, and the context in which they work, so as to identify the nature painting at the beginning of the twenty-first century. / Finally, the discussion of South Australian painting in this thesis informs the consideration of painting as an art form generally. It shows that painting today is very different from that of the modernist era, but that it retains significant power and appeal. / Thesis (MVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2004.

Thesis (M.Ed. (Art/Design))--University of South Australia, 1994.

"This research project aims to provide a contemporary visualisation of "specific sites." The visualisation of these selected landscapes will draw upon and add to existing traditions of representation of this region, embedding my experiences within this dialogue." / Master of Arts (Visual Arts)