The contemporary visual landscape can be seen as a continuously shifting experience of surfaces. Synthetic, glossy, reflective, transparent, flexible and colour saturated. We find them often in the form of architectural facades, automotive finishes, interior fabrications, printed materials and design objects. They are rich, seductive and desirable skins on the surface of everyday items. / Within recent contemporary visual art practice, and particularly certain nonobjective painting practices, there can be seen to be an engagement with the idea of surface as it relates to aspects of the 'everyday'. These artists are often incorporating 'new' materials and methods of making that actively respond to what is out there in our lived urban environment. They share a concern for rigorous play with an attention to surface quality, functionality, materiality and manipulability. Contemporary artists such as Thomas Rentmeister, Ian Davenport or Jessica Stockholder, to name just a few, could be seen to fit here. On the function of paint and surface Stockholder writes: The paint functions both to alter existing surfaces and as a very flat object in its own right placed over or alongside other objects. The surface of the object conceals the mass of the object from us; it is also the part of the object revealed to our sight, it is an area where we are vulnerable to deception and also a site poignantly ripe for the development of fiction. The surface becomes a tenuous site where fiction and reality struggle with notions of subjectivity and objectivity to find boundaries or to determine difference. / Stockholder talks here about the fundamental ability of paint to alter the visual and tactile characteristics of the 'thing' being painted, making its reality somewhat indeterminate by imposing a different quality. She speaks about paint in terms of surface substance, surface quality and surface manipulation. Paint is a substance separate from the object it is applied to; like a skin yet capable of transforming its visual and tactile presence in extreme ways, rendering the object less certain. It is this potential of paint as a plastic material capable of contradictory functions that underlies this research project and defines my use of the term 'uncertainty' in the title of my thesis. / Surface - as a kind of fluid, organic, and mobile skin applied over a structure or even as 'structure' itself - can be seen to be a key operative concern within several important architecture and design practices of the past ten years. This development is itself influenced largely by the potential of recent technological developments in software design tools and new materials and manufacturing techniques, which now enable complex, topographically located objects and structures to be readily designed and manufactured. / My research set out to focus mainly on recent comtemporary painting, sculpture and installation practices which, through the use of new materials and methods of making, engage primarily with the manipulation of a surface in a way that emphasises a largely visual engagement with the work. The exegesis will look at the historical relationship of such work to a largely modernist tradition of material-based practice, in an attempt to suggest there exists today a particular attitude that has a positive and openly indexical relationship to the surfaces of our everyday urban environment. This will be supported and extended by references made to particular contemporary design and architectural practices that share concerns for uncertain surfaces or surfaces that suggest ambiguity and flux. / The major focus of my research into this topic has been the development in the studio of a body of artefacts that have been exhibited at various points during my candidature. The written exegesis attempts to position these studio artefacts within a wider critical/cultural context, through discussion of the studio work as situated in relation to ideas and works developed largely by other visual artists, but also by designers and architects which share similar concerns and aesthetic sensibilities with the particular notion of surface that I am attempting to define. / Thesis (MVisualArts) - University of South Australia, 2004.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/267476 |
| Creators | Kutschbach, Michael. |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | copyright under review |
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