No description available.

This thesis includes a portfolio of written compositions and a written commentary. The compositions submitted present the development of a bespoke notation that reflects a specific set of aesthetic concerns. The written commentary is comprised of five chapters. The first four each deal with a specific aesthetic interest and present the majority of the composition portfolio as an ongoing research project. The final chapter is a commentary on the final work in the portfolio, the opera Palace of Junk, and reflects on this work as the culmination of the research undertaken. Throughout the commentary, aesthetic ideas are considered for both their sonic capabilities and the possibilities of imbuing a more physical style of playing. The subsequent notation developed, represents a method in which the resultant sound and physical action is implicit within the score.

This exegesis speaks to the body of work constructed over three years between February 2004 and April 2007, assembled and exhibited at the Lismore Regional Gallery in May 2007 under the title A Farewell To Meat: Rendering Ambivalence and Transgression. Written concurrently with the production of the paintings, this writing maps the literature surveyed and documents the studio research undertaken.This research consisted of collecting imagery from a wide range of sites and allowing it to trigger abductive pictorial responses. Erupting from this collecting process, social texts such as TV and radio news, cultural texts such as cinema and literature, and the subtext formed by my own dreams and nightmares were conflated to become a kind of mythology that informs the paintings and artist books in the exhibition. My studio research on one level, became a kind of phenomenological investigation that probed and responded to a media saturated consumer culture, whilst on another level, it seeks to facilitate the injection of an element of cognitive dissonance back into this culture.The resultant creative output utilises the efficacy of the image and the subversive power of metaphor to engage with several interconnected themes. These range from the dialectic of truth and illusion in the painted space, to power relations, marginalisation and the possibility of finding holes in that maze without exits we call ‘capitalism’. An ostensibly atavistic utilisation of figuration and oil paint is intended as a lucid rebuttal of 20th Century/modernist notions of minimalism and the so-called ‘end of painting’. The relationship within the paintings between the medium and the message (the paint and the illusion) seeks to operate like the drapery found in paintings from the Baroque era that antinomically both reveals and conceals the forms beneath it. This scopic contradiction serves as an anamorphosistic mirror which, in my own work, highlights the subterfuge and legerdemain currently operating behind the veil constituted by technology and contemporary mass culture.The goofy, cartoon-like nature of the paintings and the aleatory strategies deployed in their construction, bear witness to the profundity of play in contrast to the burdensome yoke of labour. The artist books articulate more fully the innovative nature of the research and complement the paintings in a way that adds the dynamic of a digital dimension to the more traditional methods of oil painting on canvas.As a crassly instrumental reason insists on tightening its grip on human affairs, everywhere emphasising efficiency over playfulness, and as coercive structures of order continue to reduce my ontic options to an ever-diminishing range of superlatively insipid and uninteresting purchasing ‘choices’, the capacity for play, for ridiculousness, for absurdity, noise and laziness, for me, became symbolically central.

This thesis is a critical analysis and reconfiguration of the physical frame in contemporary art. Drawing on historical, theoretical and technical knowledge bases, the thesis characterises the physical frame as the material manifestation of an act (or set of acts) of framing: a constructed ??surplus?? or necessary appendage created to mediate and protect an artwork, connecting it to physical and conceptual contexts in order to facilitate a better understanding of the framed work. The frame is thus depicted as ??work-sensitive??, being formed in response to, and as a direct result of, the work of art. This distinguishes the frame from notions of ??site?? and ??place??, which both connote pre- existing spaces. The physical frame, rather than describing the setting or site to which an artwork is added or contributes to, describes the material build-up which is added to the work. The thesis documents and examines the various ways that contemporary artists employ physical frames to negotiate physical and conceptual space for artworks. This framing perspective is contrary to the prevalent mindset that contemporary artworks - having broken out beyond the picture frame into real space and time - are now frameless. As a result of this research, the physical frame is reconfigured as an open-ended cellular construct, offering up multiple narrative threads. A distinction is made in the thesis between an ??immediate?? frame (a frame immediately attached to an artwork which the viewer stands on the ??outside?? of, such as a picture frame) and an ??extended?? frame (an immersive kind of frame experienced by the viewer from ??within?? the frame, as with a ??circumtextual?? frame). In addition to clarifying and developing upon existing framing terminology, this thesis presents a new taxonomic scale of frames in order to test the hypothesis that ??immediate?? frames can be discussed and categorised according to their level of involvement with their associated artworks. This framing model offers a new filter through which to approach the contemporary artwork, and provides a method, vocabulary and set of questions to dissect and articulate the presence and relevance of a detected frame.

No description available.

This thesis is a critical analysis and reconfiguration of the physical frame in contemporary art. Drawing on historical, theoretical and technical knowledge bases, the thesis characterises the physical frame as the material manifestation of an act (or set of acts) of framing: a constructed ??surplus?? or necessary appendage created to mediate and protect an artwork, connecting it to physical and conceptual contexts in order to facilitate a better understanding of the framed work. The frame is thus depicted as ??work-sensitive??, being formed in response to, and as a direct result of, the work of art. This distinguishes the frame from notions of ??site?? and ??place??, which both connote pre- existing spaces. The physical frame, rather than describing the setting or site to which an artwork is added or contributes to, describes the material build-up which is added to the work. The thesis documents and examines the various ways that contemporary artists employ physical frames to negotiate physical and conceptual space for artworks. This framing perspective is contrary to the prevalent mindset that contemporary artworks - having broken out beyond the picture frame into real space and time - are now frameless. As a result of this research, the physical frame is reconfigured as an open-ended cellular construct, offering up multiple narrative threads. A distinction is made in the thesis between an ??immediate?? frame (a frame immediately attached to an artwork which the viewer stands on the ??outside?? of, such as a picture frame) and an ??extended?? frame (an immersive kind of frame experienced by the viewer from ??within?? the frame, as with a ??circumtextual?? frame). In addition to clarifying and developing upon existing framing terminology, this thesis presents a new taxonomic scale of frames in order to test the hypothesis that ??immediate?? frames can be discussed and categorised according to their level of involvement with their associated artworks. This framing model offers a new filter through which to approach the contemporary artwork, and provides a method, vocabulary and set of questions to dissect and articulate the presence and relevance of a detected frame.

This exegesis speaks to the body of work constructed over three years between February 2004 and April 2007, assembled and exhibited at the Lismore Regional Gallery in May 2007 under the title A Farewell To Meat: Rendering Ambivalence and Transgression. Written concurrently with the production of the paintings, this writing maps the literature surveyed and documents the studio research undertaken.This research consisted of collecting imagery from a wide range of sites and allowing it to trigger abductive pictorial responses. Erupting from this collecting process, social texts such as TV and radio news, cultural texts such as cinema and literature, and the subtext formed by my own dreams and nightmares were conflated to become a kind of mythology that informs the paintings and artist books in the exhibition. My studio research on one level, became a kind of phenomenological investigation that probed and responded to a media saturated consumer culture, whilst on another level, it seeks to facilitate the injection of an element of cognitive dissonance back into this culture.The resultant creative output utilises the efficacy of the image and the subversive power of metaphor to engage with several interconnected themes. These range from the dialectic of truth and illusion in the painted space, to power relations, marginalisation and the possibility of finding holes in that maze without exits we call ‘capitalism’. An ostensibly atavistic utilisation of figuration and oil paint is intended as a lucid rebuttal of 20th Century/modernist notions of minimalism and the so-called ‘end of painting’. The relationship within the paintings between the medium and the message (the paint and the illusion) seeks to operate like the drapery found in paintings from the Baroque era that antinomically both reveals and conceals the forms beneath it. This scopic contradiction serves as an anamorphosistic mirror which, in my own work, highlights the subterfuge and legerdemain currently operating behind the veil constituted by technology and contemporary mass culture.The goofy, cartoon-like nature of the paintings and the aleatory strategies deployed in their construction, bear witness to the profundity of play in contrast to the burdensome yoke of labour. The artist books articulate more fully the innovative nature of the research and complement the paintings in a way that adds the dynamic of a digital dimension to the more traditional methods of oil painting on canvas.As a crassly instrumental reason insists on tightening its grip on human affairs, everywhere emphasising efficiency over playfulness, and as coercive structures of order continue to reduce my ontic options to an ever-diminishing range of superlatively insipid and uninteresting purchasing ‘choices’, the capacity for play, for ridiculousness, for absurdity, noise and laziness, for me, became symbolically central.

This exegesis speaks to the body of work constructed over three years between February 2004 and April 2007, assembled and exhibited at the Lismore Regional Gallery in May 2007 under the title A Farewell To Meat: Rendering Ambivalence and Transgression. Written concurrently with the production of the paintings, this writing maps the literature surveyed and documents the studio research undertaken.This research consisted of collecting imagery from a wide range of sites and allowing it to trigger abductive pictorial responses. Erupting from this collecting process, social texts such as TV and radio news, cultural texts such as cinema and literature, and the subtext formed by my own dreams and nightmares were conflated to become a kind of mythology that informs the paintings and artist books in the exhibition. My studio research on one level, became a kind of phenomenological investigation that probed and responded to a media saturated consumer culture, whilst on another level, it seeks to facilitate the injection of an element of cognitive dissonance back into this culture.The resultant creative output utilises the efficacy of the image and the subversive power of metaphor to engage with several interconnected themes. These range from the dialectic of truth and illusion in the painted space, to power relations, marginalisation and the possibility of finding holes in that maze without exits we call ‘capitalism’. An ostensibly atavistic utilisation of figuration and oil paint is intended as a lucid rebuttal of 20th Century/modernist notions of minimalism and the so-called ‘end of painting’. The relationship within the paintings between the medium and the message (the paint and the illusion) seeks to operate like the drapery found in paintings from the Baroque era that antinomically both reveals and conceals the forms beneath it. This scopic contradiction serves as an anamorphosistic mirror which, in my own work, highlights the subterfuge and legerdemain currently operating behind the veil constituted by technology and contemporary mass culture.The goofy, cartoon-like nature of the paintings and the aleatory strategies deployed in their construction, bear witness to the profundity of play in contrast to the burdensome yoke of labour. The artist books articulate more fully the innovative nature of the research and complement the paintings in a way that adds the dynamic of a digital dimension to the more traditional methods of oil painting on canvas.As a crassly instrumental reason insists on tightening its grip on human affairs, everywhere emphasising efficiency over playfulness, and as coercive structures of order continue to reduce my ontic options to an ever-diminishing range of superlatively insipid and uninteresting purchasing ‘choices’, the capacity for play, for ridiculousness, for absurdity, noise and laziness, for me, became symbolically central.

Sir Harrison Birtwistle is one of Britain's leading contemporary composers. His intellectually challenging music has so far proved difficult to analyse. This thesis aims to account for the significance of Birtwistle's earliest published works, commenting on existing analyses, developing new approaches and, where available, drawing on the composer's own sketches, drafts and other manuscripts, reflecting my belief that the early music represents a clear blueprint for later works. The thesis is in two parts. The first consists of chapters 1 and 2, which deal with works for which no sketch material survives. The emphasis is initially on accounting for Birtwistle within a broader historical context, as well as developing new ways of investigating the works based on links with other contemporary artists and musicians, and interests the composer declared. This part also includes extended discussion of a work thought to have been lost, but which is in fact stored in the Birtwistle Sammlung at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel. Whilst the chapters incorporate theoretical tools, works are treated on their own terms, and analytical methods are developed which respond to apparently new concerns, rather than subsume each work within an over-arching theoretical model. However, a number of themes are developed at this stage and carried throughout the thesis: especially, the use of tone rows, associative pitch projection, motivic permutation and forms of textural association. The second part, represented by chapters 3, 4 and 5, covers works for which a substantial amount of manuscript material exists, stored at the Sacher Foundation. Whilst earlier themes are continued, new issues relating to time and evocations of the pastoral are introduced in response to developments in the 1970s. Another theme developed through these chapters concerns problems surrounding the status of sketch material, its value to analysis, and the extent to which the sketches make different analytical demands from the scores.

This thesis reads the poetry and poetics of Charles Bernstein in relation to his interest in sophistry and sophistics. Taking his 1987 volume The Sophist as a central text, the influence of a sense of sophistics is developed across his wider range of published works. This involves identifying some of the many different interpretations of the sophists throughout the history of philosophy, from the early dismissals by Plato and Aristotle to the more recent reappraisals of their works. A secondary aspect of the thesis is in examining the renewal of interest in the Ancient Greek sophists and suggesting some of the affinities between contemporary literary theory and poetics and the fragments of the works of the major sophists (primarily Protagoras and Gorgias). Finally, I suggest that The Sophist itself is a valuable and contemporaneous re-examination of sophistic ideas, that in fact goes further than those by academics from within philosophy and rhetoric by virtue of employing the stylistic innovations and linguistic experimentation that was so central to the sophistic approach.