This thesis examines the trajectory of the ‘social document’ in contemporary art since 1989. Though art’s turn towards documentary modes has now been widely noted, this study establishes a longer, more complex engagement with the dialogue between the lens and the situational immediacy of artists’ social interventions. I argue that the social documents that arise through the reconfigured artwork can be connected with the demand for the circulation of social knowledge and increasingly urgent questions of realism, a methodology that divided the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde of the 20th century. Central issues broached by the thesis include the demand for the extraction and re-articulation of truth, the role of visual representation in the address to totality and the emergence of (independent) knowledge and (critical) pedagogy as key sites of struggle. My analysis begins, in Part I, with a selective mapping of the historical terrain through which I offer re-readings of prescient works produced in the 1960s and 1970s in a range of capitalist and state socialist contexts including Mary Kelly, Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia and Sanja Iveković. I then move on to a more detailed appraisal of the ascendancy of the social document in art following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the consolidation of global capitalism, situating its various calibrations in relation to what I call biopolitical globalisation. Part II takes a thematic approach to the material, using case studies to examine a) the curatorial narrativisation and production of social documents, b) the relevance of feminist elaborations on theories of social reproduction to analyses of the social document and art history, c) the persistent invocation of ethics in discussions of works that document the social subjects of the new economy, d) the implications of addressing the social document as a realist enterprise. Artists discussed in Part II include Anton Vidokle, Martha Rosler, WochenKlausur, Dani Marti and Pilvi Takala.

Nam June Paik (1932-2006) is well known as the father of video art. However, this study demonstrates the importance of his earlier interactive art (1961-63), which historically has been overshadowed by his video art. At the climax of his career in interactive art, Paik introduced his two-way art to the public at his first solo exhibition in Wuppertal, West Germany, in 1963. Interactive art itself has been a peripheral area in the history of art, and it has plural pioneers across disciplinary boundaries. Among the several origins of interactive art, Nam June Paik utilized music as a fundamental approach to design the emerging art. Concentrating on Paik’s music theory and practice in West Germany, my research traces the unexplored academic area of his articles about new music in the Korean newspaper Chayushinmun(1958-59). The perspective in his articles toward new music became a significant foundation for his progressive interactive art. Based on his music background, Paik knew how to incorporate musical instruments and devices into his interactive art. Finally, this study will articulate a concrete relationship between Paik’s musical experiences and his interactive art. It argues that his interactive pieces, based on his musical experiences, make him one of the most creative pioneers of interactive art.

Fur, Pixels, Loved Ones and Other Transients is a paper discussing my practice from 2000 to 2003. It is a personal and theoretical exploration of common concepts and theories in reference to my works Fluff Snuffs (2000), Relentless (2001), Trigger Displacement (2002), Bathing in a Warm Glow of Nothing (2003) and Memory Play Back (2003). The effects of Tele-visual and computer mediated images of death and violence within these works are investigated, which lead to an exploration of fear and trauma. This mechanism of mediation is used within the works as a means of exploring the subtleties within the screen-based image that may go unnoticed or seem disconcerting. The role of the soft toy is an important element in these works and this is further explored by referencing the use of the soft toy in works of several other contemporary artists. These works are discussed to further explore the complexity of ideas on death, violence, trauma, memory and fear / Master of Arts (Hons) (Contemporary Arts)

This arts-based thesis will explore ethnic identity and narrative in symbolic self-portraiture as themes for a body of work. This paper will discuss how identity and narrative play an important role in the empowerment of the artist and viewer. It will also show how this can be incorporated into an art classroom engaged in multicultural learning and the study of visual culture to empower students and give them opportunities to narrate their life stories.

Though an installation, the exhibition Four Corners Gateway, examines how history and memory construct us as individuals and construct our national and personal identities and worldviews. All such constructions are ultimately fragmented and fictional. This body of work points at how ideologically formed, subjective narratives are made into ‘truths’. Connecting the personal with the public is my way of playing with history and its paradoxes. The resulting landscapes that I construct can be read as archives of fragments.

This arts-based study discusses using the horror film and monsters as a means of exploring the personification of fear in contemporary society. The paper incorporates the viewing and dissection of horror films into an artistic process to explore fears in order to further artistic expression. It additionally shows how this process can be used in an art classroom within the context of contemporary art to empower students and facilitate art criticism discussions.

This arts-based thesis will explore ethnic identity and narrative in symbolic self-portraiture as themes for a body of work. This paper will discuss how identity and narrative play an important role in the empowerment of the artist and viewer. It will also show how this can be incorporated into an art classroom engaged in multicultural learning and the study of visual culture to empower students and give them opportunities to narrate their life stories.

Though an installation, the exhibition Four Corners Gateway, examines how history and memory construct us as individuals and construct our national and personal identities and worldviews. All such constructions are ultimately fragmented and fictional. This body of work points at how ideologically formed, subjective narratives are made into ‘truths’. Connecting the personal with the public is my way of playing with history and its paradoxes. The resulting landscapes that I construct can be read as archives of fragments.

This thesis investigates, through a body of interdisciplinary artwork, the representation of the grotesque body. It examines how it might be possible to manipulate the iconography of attraction and repulsion in contemporary art with the aim of confusing the binary opposition of what signifies pleasure and disgust. Each of the three artworks function to draw the audience into a powerful and affective relationship with representations that are simultaneously appealing and revolting. Using a number of modes and techniques to disrupt the dyad, including audience interaction and the use of seductive visual forms, the work focuses on my body as a site for the development of new knowledge about the representation of the non-preferred body. By bringing together otherwise unrelated discourses such as horror and formalist abstract painting, the artwork in this study attempts to call into doubt received wisdom about the nature of beauty and ugliness. There are a lexicon of different artistic mediums explored in this project including performance, installation, video and photography. The engagement with these disciplines represents an attempt to speculate on how we know and experience the body in an increasingly mediatised world. This research is also a key means of highlighting how our understanding of the body is informed by the differing effects of timebased, photographic and performative media. By creating a series of dialogues between the live and the virtual, timebased and static imagery, and the fragmentary body and its relationship to the holistic body, this project seeks to activate in the viewer/participant, a critical self-reflexivity. I ask how it is possible to know and experience corporeality in a virtual world of digitally manipulated bodies.

This thesis proposes that contemporary printmaking, at its most significant, marks the present through reconstructing pasts and anticipating futures. It argues this through examples in the field, occurring in contexts beyond the Euramerican (Europe and North America). The arguments revolve around how the practice of a number of significant artists in Japan, Australia and Thailand has generated conceptual and formal innovations in printmaking that transcend local histories and conventions, whilst paradoxically, also building upon them and creating new meanings. The arguments do not portray the relations between contemporary and traditional art as necessarily antagonistic but rather, as productively dialectical. Furthermore, the case studies demonstrate that, in the 1980s and 1990s particularly, the studio practice of these printmakers was informed by other visual arts disciplines and reflected postmodern concerns. Departures from convention witnessed in these countries within the Asia-Pacific region shifted the field of the print into a heterogeneous and hybrid realm. The practitioners concerned (especially in Thailand) produced work that was more readily equated with performance and installation art than with printmaking per se. In Japan, the incursion of photography interrupted the decorative cast of printmaking and delivered it from a straightforward, craft-based aesthetic. In Australia, fixed notions of national identity were challenged by print practitioners through deliberate cultural rapprochements and technical contradictions (speaking across old and new languages).However time-honoured print methods were not jettisoned by any case study artists. Their re-alignment of the fundamental attributes of printmaking, in line with materialist formalism, is a core consideration of my arguments. The artists selected for in-depth analysis from these three countries are all innovators whose geographical circumstances and creative praxis drew on local traditions whilst absorbing international trends. In their radical revisionism, they acknowledged the specificity of history and place, conditions of contingency and forces of globalisation. The transformational nature of their work during the late twentieth century connects it to the postmodern ethos and to a broader artistic and cultural nexus than has hitherto been recognised in literature on the print. Emerging from former guild-based practices, they ambitiously conceived their work to be part of a continually evolving visual arts vocabulary. I argue in this thesis that artists from the Asia-Pacific region have historically broken with the hermetic and Euramerican focus that has generally characterised the field. Inadequate documentation and access to print activity outside the dominant centres of critical discourse imply that readings of postmodernism have been too limited in their scope of inquiry. Other locations offer complexities of artistic practice where re-alignments of customary boundaries are often the norm. By addressing innovative activity in Japan, Australia and Thailand, this thesis exposes the need for a more inclusive theoretical framework and wider global reach than currently exists for ‘printmaking’.