Thesis
The art of installation : scripting thresholds
Southern Cross university
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
2000
Metrics
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Abstract
For the last decade I have focused upon making sculptural installations which have been site-specific and ephemeral. During this time I have developed a range of sculptural strategies which have addressed the spatio-temporal dynamics of working with this sculptural 'medium'. While I have understood such strategies to be fundamental to installation, they have largely been absent from contemporary discourses concerned with this practice. It was to address this lack that I began this research project. My research was divided into three 'stages'. In the first stage I made a series of installations for different sites, using similar materials and objects. The second stage involved writing a thesis and the third stage was a return to making artwork informed by the preceding two stages.
In the second stage I addressed the lack in contemporary discourses of serious consideration of the skills and knowledges involved in creating installation works by reviewing the ways in which installation has been understood and spoken about. This also involved a recognition of which speaking positions in the visual arts have been understood as authoritative and which languages have been acceptable. Generally the terms of this discourse have relied upon critical approaches and languages more suitable for describing and analysing two-dimensional spaces available to the eye. This has also involved the use of reception practices which have ignored that the 'viewer' of installations physically entered the work and therefore contributed to it through her / his embodied presence.
Despite challenges to traditional ways of 'reading' art works, precipitated by postmodernist and feminist theories and practices, these performative dimensions within installation have largely been overlooked. Instead traditional relations constructed through binarised terms have been relied upon, including production - consumption,
body - mind, materiality - discourse and the 'real' - the 'represented. Historically, such oppositional pairings encouraged the validity of only one term. As such pairings carried a gendered dimension, my story as a female practitioner, making epistemological claims for embodied practices, has competed poorly, when rationality, epistemology and maleness have been conflated. In order for me to speak authoritatively, alternative conceptual models and speaking positions with different spatialisations were needed. I needed to locate a space in-between polarised dualities. To search out such spaces for my speaking, I have drawn upon feminist interventions within disciplinary knowledges of geography, anthropology, cultural studies, the social sciences and psychology.
Details
- Title
- The art of installation : scripting thresholds
- Creators
- Maree Helen Bracker
- Contributors
- Nel Glass (Supervisor) - Southern Cross UniversityJan Anne Davis (Supervisor) - Southern Cross University
- Awarding Institution
- Southern Cross University; Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Theses
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Southern Cross University
- Publisher
- Southern Cross university
- Number of pages
- ix, 226 pages
- Identifiers
- 991012945299602368
- Copyright
- © Maree Bracker 2000
- Academic Unit
- School of Health and Human Sciences; School of Arts and Social Sciences; Nursing; Faculty of Health
- Resource Type
- Thesis