Supervisors
J Birrell (external supervisor)
My research interests are: an investigation into artists strategies for rule testing and critical approaches to practice. To explore the possibilities for artists operating within the restricted sphere of art world’s practices to put forward oppositional or subversive discourses which run counter to bourgeois and avant-garde models of taste and manners.
The thesis is presented over several objects
What is being tested out in practice?
A series of interviews with artists in which artist’s practice will have been extensively researched. The main question put to each artist will be ‘what is being tested out by the practice?’. In order to discover from the artist, what about their individual practices is being put under pressure or threatened both internally as to artists approach to making work, and externally in the social sphere of practice in the world. These interviews are filmed on DV and transcribed into text.
Is it possible to produce a social practice of the artist which is other than the purely visual?
An exhibition of the artists chosen for the thesis where the interviews will form an integral part both as a collective work inits own right and foregrounding the artist's voice as central to work. Making the artists voices an intervention into exhibition practice. Works chosen from the artists studios with works from my studio practice.
Is it possible for the artist to be a social producer otherthan the prescribed solitary producer?
Publication of a catalogue with the interviews including a diary of my practices as interviewer, lecturer and artist. A brief historical view of art precedents for such practices identifying certain orthodoxies of ‘goodness’ against which artists have reacted in order to define their own practice through critical negation. The artists chosen for this exercise have all made conscious decisions at some point to resist categorisation and question the parameters of their practice.
