It's Complicated: Romancing the [male] modernist canon

IT’S COMPLICATED: ROMANCING THE [MALE] MODERNIST CANON Courtney Coombs BFA Visual Art (Honours) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Creative Industries Faculty Queensland University of Technology May 2015 I feel that art is an intellectual process which both questions and affirms the very nature of being. My concerns of identity within and outside the confines of my studio or working situation have everything to do with my experience. And my experience is primarily that of an artist and I am a female. Lynda Benglis 1971 Keywords Ambiguity, boys club, contemporary art, collaboration, collectivity, critique, deconstruction, dialogue, exchange, faux-llaboration, Feminisms, Feminist Art, found object, gender, humour, installation, inequality, intimacy, irony, loss, love, knowledge, metaphor, Minimalism, narrative, patriarchy, political, Postminimalism, power, privilege, recontextualisation, reflexivity, romance, tentative gesture, voice, vulnerability, women. It’s Complicated: Romancing the [male] modernist canon i Abstract While women have engaged actively in the production of visual art over centuries, and feminisms’ influence on the field has been notable for at least forty years, women are still sidelined in the predominant discourse of art. Women continue to struggle to find their place, personally, historically and professionally in these circumstances. While some feminist artists have been involved in the creation of a separate realm of art production that rejects the dominant paradigm of masculine art discourse (Contemporary Art), this effectively surrenders the field, leaving those in power comfortably so. This research project proposes a model of dialogue between the [predominantly male] modernist canon and models of feminist resistance. By employing a practice based methodology that utilises humour as a method for ironic deconstruction as well as a feminist methodology of revision, critique, and dialogic exchange, the resulting body of work disrupts and augments the modernist canon through a series of intimate and interpersonal exchanges. Making intimate relationships explicit, the artworks explore collaborative and faux-llaborative processes to form a series of tentative gestures that refute notions of mastery and control. ii It’s Complicated: Romancing the [male] modernist canon Table of Contents Keywords ...................................................................................................................................i Abstract .................................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents .................................................................................................................... iii List of Figures ........................................................................................................................... v Statement of Original Authorship ............................................................................................vi Acknowledgements ................................................................................................................ vii Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................ 1 Chapter 2: Contextual Review .................................................................................. 5 THE MALE DOMINATED FIELD OF ART .......................................................................... 6 Why have there been no Great Women Artists? ............................................................. 6 The Boys’ Club ............................................................................................................... 8 Minimalism/Minimal Art ................................................................................................ 9 Postminimalism/Postminimalist Art ............................................................................. 15 Women and Postminimalist Practice ............................................................................ 22 FEMINISTS CAN BE FUNNY .............................................................................................. 32 Feminist Art .................................................................................................................. 32 Humour in Feminist Art ................................................................................................ 35 VALIE EXPORT .......................................................................................................... 36 Lynda Benglis ............................................................................................................... 41 LOVE AND NARRATIVE .................................................................................................... 44 Love ..................................................................................................................... 45 Tracey Emin .................................................................................................................. 46 Felix Gonzalez-Torres .................................................................................................. 48 Fictive Narratives .......................................................................................................... 53 Sophie Calle .................................................................................................................. 54 Chapter 3: Research Design .................................................................................... 59 PRACTICE AS RESEARCH.................................................................................................. 59 Practice-based research – The tentative gesture ........................................................... 59 Reflexivity..................................................................................................................... 61 Collaboration................................................................................................................. 62 Humour as a method of ironic deconstruction .............................................................. 65 FEMINIST APPROACHES TO MAKING ............................................................................ 69 Understanding Feminisms ............................................................................................ 69 Critique and Reverence ................................................................................................. 71 Uncomfortable Reflexivity ........................................................................................... 74 Dialogue and Exchange ................................................................................................ 76 Narrative Inquiry ........................................................................................................... 77 Feminisms and theory ................................................................................................... 78 Chapter 4: The Work............................................................................................... 87 COLLABORATION ............................................................................................................... 88 FAUX-LLABORATION ........................................................................................................ 92 Things (Soulmates)........................................................................................................ 96 Spread (with Bob) ......................................................................................................... 99 Consequence (after Richard) ...................................................................................... 102 It’s Complicated: Romancing the [male] modernist canon iii Pink Things ................................................................................................................. 105 Highflying .................................................................................................................. 108 Flying High................................................................................................................. 111 ROMANTIC LOVE AS IRONIC METAPHOR ................................................................. 112 I found love on a cold and icy day in Copenhagen .................................................... 115 On Show .................................................................................................................. 117 Spillage .................................................................................................................. 120 Black Spill (small) ...................................................................................................... 123 Grand Gestures .......................................................................................................... 124 TEXT, LANGUAGE AND VOICE ..................................................................................... 126 Speak Up .................................................................................................................. 129 Harden Up .................................................................................................................. 131 Stay Soft .................................................................................................................. 133 Love/Fear .................................................................................................................. 134 IT’S COMPLICATED: THE FINAL EXHIBITION ........................................................... 136 It’s Complicated ......................................................................................................... 137 With Bob and Lynda ................................................................................................... 139 Revolve/Spun .............................................................................................................. 141 The View .................................................................................................................. 144 Chapter 5: Conclusion ........................................................................................... 147 Bibliography ........................................................................................................... 153 Supplementary Material ........................................................................................ 175 iv It’s Complicated: Romancing the [male] modernist canon List of Figures Figure 2.1 Eva Hesse Expanded Expansion 1969 ................................................................ 23 Figure 2.2 Eva Hesse Expanded Expansion 1969 (In its current state) ............................... 24 Figure 2.3 Janine Antoni Gnaw 1992................................................................................... 26 Figure 2.4 Mona Hatoum Socle du monde (Base of the World) 1992-93 ............................ 28 Figure 2.5 Bruce Nauman A Cast of the Space under my Steel Chair 1965-68................... 30 Figure 2.6 Rachael Whiteread Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) 1995 ................................. 31 Figure 2.7 VALIE EXPORT Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic) 1969.................................................................................................... 38 Figure 2.8 Lynda Benglis Artforum Advertisement in: Artforum, November 1974, Vol.13, No.3, S. 3-4. 1974 .............................................................................. 42 Figure 2.9 Tracey Emin Just Love Me 1998 ........................................................................ 47 Figure 2.10 Tracey Emin Move Me 2013 ............................................................................. 48 Figure 2.11 Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled 1991 ............................................................... 50 Figure 2.12 Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Perfect Lovers) 1991 .................................... 51 Figure 2.13 Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A) 1991 ....................... 52 Figure 2.14 Sophie Calle The Fake Wedding / Le Faux Mariage 1992............................... 55 Figure 4.1 Courtney Coombs things (Soulmates) 2010 ....................................................... 97 Figure 4.2 Martin Creed Work no. 228 (THINGS) 2004 ...................................................... 98 Figure 4.3 Courtney Coombs Spread (with Bob) 2011 ...................................................... 100 Figure 4.4 Robert Rauschenburg, Untitled (Spread) 1983................................................. 101 Figure 4.5 Richard Serra Consequence 2003 ..................................................................... 103 Figure 4.5 Courtney Coombs Consequence (after Richard) 2011 ..................................... 104 Figure 4.7 Courtney Coombs Pink Things 2011 ................................................................ 106 Figure 4.8 Martin Creed Work No. 88 1995 ....................................................................... 107 Figure 4.9 Courtney Coombs Highflying 2014 .................................................................. 108 Figure 4.10 Brooke Ferguson Highflying 2014 .................................................................. 109 Figure 4.11 Courtney Coombs Flying High 2014 .............................................................. 112 Figure 4.12 Courtney Coombs I found love on a cold and icy day in Copenhagen 2011 ............................................................................................................. 115 Figure 4.13 Courtney Coombs On Show 2011 ................................................................... 118 Figure 4.14 Courtney Coombs On Show 2012 ................................................................... 119 Figure 4.15 Courtney Coombs Spillage 2012 .................................................................... 121 Figure 4.16 Courtney Coombs Black Spill (small) 2014 ................................................... 123 Figure 4.17 Courtney Coombs Grand Gestures 2013........................................................ 125 Figure 4.18 Courtney Coombs Speak Up 2011 .................................................................. 130 Figure 4.19 Courtney Coombs Harden Up 2011 ............................................................... 132 Figure 4.20 Courtney Coombs Stay Soft 2012 ................................................................... 134 Figure 4.21 Courtney Coombs Love/Fear 2014................................................................. 135 Figure 4.22 Courtney Coombs It’s Complicated 2014 ...................................................... 138 Figure 4.23 Courtney Coombs With Bob and Lynda 2014 ................................................ 140 Figure 4.24 Courtney Coombs Revolve/Spun 2014 ........................................................... 143 Figure 4.25 Courtney Coombs The View 2014 .................................................................. 145 It’s Complicated: Romancing the [male] modernist canon v Statement of Original Authorship The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made. Signature: Date: 21/5/2014 vi It’s Complicated: Romancing the [male] modernist canon Acknowledgements This project was by no means an autonomous affair. There are many people who have made this PhD possible. First, I must also acknowledge the support of the APA scholarship, which made this project feasible in the first instance. I must also acknowledge and thank the many artist-run initiatives, directors, curators and institutions who supported my practice and exhibited the creative outcomes of the PhD over the period of the last six years. To my supervisors Dr. Courtney Pedersen (principle) and Mark Webb (associate), it seems a cliché, but there simply are not the words to express my gratitude for your unwavering support, inspiration, dialogue and exchange. Your dedication to your field and your roles as educators has made an impression on me that will last a lifetime. To say that I would not be completing this PhD without you is an understatement. Thank you. To Visual Arts staff Prof. Andrew McNamara, Dr. Mark Pennings, Dr. Daniel Mafe, Mike Riddle and Charles Robb, thank you for your support and feedback along the way. To my No Frills* peeps, Catherine Sagin, Kate Woodcroft and Michelle Woulahan (Antoinette J. Citizen), and LEVEL crew, Caitlin Franzmann, Rachael Haynes, Anita Holtsclaw, Alice Lang, and Courtney Pedersen (again), you each have my heart. Your collectivity, collaboration and friendship have taught me so much. To Anastasia Booth, Joseph Breikers, Clare Dyson, Brooke Ferguson, Svenja Kratz, Vanessa Loh, Ruth McConchie, Daniel McKewen, Maegan McKewen, Rachael Parsons and Siall Waterbright1, a big and heartfelt thank you for your support of each and every one of the small wins throughout this process. To my parents Greg and Jo Coombs, your unwavering faith that I could do this means more than I can say. And last, but by no means least, to my gorgeous daughter Finlay, you are my inspiration. I could not and would not have done this without you. Thank you for simply being you. 1 Professional editor, Siall Waterbright, provided copyediting and proofreading services, according to the guidelines laid out in the university-endorsed guidelines and the Australian Standards for editing research theses’. It’s Complicated: Romancing the [male] modernist canon vii Chapter 1: Introduction I commenced this PhD research project directly following the completion of my Honours degree (Visual Art). The end of that degree felt like the beginning; it was only at that point that I had been able to identify my practice as feminist. I have always known that I was a feminist, but my work didn’t look like Feminist Art. As a consequence I was motivated to explore how my practice, one that was in equal parts critical of and reverent of the problematic field of modern art, could be acknowledged as contemporary feminist art practice. At the time, early 2009, ‘feminism’ still seemed to be a dirty word, languishing from the effects of the 1990s “backlash” to the feminist movement [both within the arts and society more broadly] (Faludi 1992). Throughout my studies my peers had groaned every time I mentioned the ‘f’ word, as did most people I knew at the time. I was a single mother, who had been raised by a single mother, and, as a consequence, was well aware of the injustice of inequality, specifically in relation to the unequal demands and expectations placed on men and women in their role as parent. As a young, middle class white woman I was aware of my many privileges, but still frustrated that my experience of life was different to a man’s simply because of my sex. This research project proposes a model of dialogue between the [predominantly male] modernist canon and models of feminist resistance. By employing a practicebased methodology that utilises humour as a method for ironic deconstruction, as well as a feminist methodology of revision, critique, and dialogic exchange, the resulting body of work disrupts and augments the modernist canon through a series of intimate and interpersonal exchanges. Making intimate relationships explicit, the Chapter 1: Introduction 1 artworks explore collaborative and faux-llaborative processes to form a series of tentative gestures that refute notions of mastery and control. Embracing a position of ambivalence while directly responding to the [male] history of art, the works disrupt the sanctity of masculine canon, inserting a feminist voice that speaks from a position of both reverence and critique. The key findings and contribution to knowledge are based in these creative outcomes and as such are weighted at 70%, with this exegesis, formulated to assist in the delivery of the research, weighted at 30%. In Chapter 2 I provide the historical and theoretical context for my artistic practice. I give an overview of Minimalist and Postminimalist Art in order to present the starting point of this research. I also provide an overview of Feminist Art and, in particular, feminist approaches to making that utilise humour as a strategy for critique. I then outline romantic love as a useful ironic metaphor for examining patriarchal systems, and propose it as a key conceptual material for engaging with alternative feminist engagements with the world. In Chapter 3 I present the design of the research, including a description of my own particular practice-based, feminist methodology for both the creative outputs and theoretically based research. I discuss humour as a strategy for deconstructing patriarchal paradigms of art; reflexivity in the process of making work; the paradoxical relationship between reverence and critique in the analysis of art; and the value of dialogue, exchange and narrative as a method for engagement in art practice. I also discuss the development of my feminist voice. 2 Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 4 focuses on the creative outputs of this PhD; in it I discuss a selection of work produced from February 2009 to December 2014, concentrating on the three key themes that have emerged over the course of this project: collaboration and fauxllaboration; romantic love as an ironic metaphor used to critique patriarchal structures, and the development of text, language and voice. In unpacking the impact of embracing a feminist ideology, and developing that ideology into a methodology to address all aspects of living, the complicated relationship feminisms have with contemporary visual art practices are revealed. Developing a strong and continually growing feminist approach impacted all aspects of my life and this chapter highlights the various practical outcomes of my growing understanding of feminisms and their relevance to my research. I have endeavoured to communicate this research in my own voice: a visual voice in the creative outcomes, and a combination of academic and personal voice in this exegesis. In the beginning, I struggled to speak across these three languages; I felt muted in a variety of ways, and the development of my voice has been a key element of this project. My visual voice has developed consistently over the course of this project, and it has been the one I’ve been most comfortable using throughout this process. My academic and my personal voices have developed in tandem, and are interwoven in this document. Like many researchers who engage with feminist theories and embrace a feminist methodology, I have sought alternative methods of writing, implementing “a more personal voice, an expanded use of metaphor, [and] a less rigid methodological framework” (Bridwell-Bowles 1992, 350). Nina Lykke (2010, 180-181) proposes that the desire to communicate in an “easily accessible style” stems from “a close relationship between feminist research, activism and Chapter 1: Introduction 3 politics.” I do not aim to radically change the structure of writing, but rather, communicate in a way that is both theoretically engaged and authentically mine. I use punctuation throughout this document to highlight my use of subjective voice, inverted commas are used to signal an emphasis of tone or reference, and square parenthesis are used to indicate my thought process, drawing attention to the various tones of my academic voice. In this exegesis, I do not write as a woman, but I am a woman when I write. I own my position as a white, middle-class, queer woman. I do not align myself with either essentialist2 or constructionist3 thought. I can see value in both positions however, and find connection with Diana Fuss’s (1989) work that seeks to explore “essence” rather than essentialism or constructionism. Fuss (1989) argues that binaries such as essentialism and constructionism cannot exist without the other4 and that there is an unhelpful antagonistic quality about each as a distinctive category for critique. She makes this claim while acknowledging her position as an “anti-essentialist who wants to preserve (in both senses of the term: to maintain and to embalm) the category of essence”5 (Fuss 1989, xiv). In the spirit of dialogue central to this project, I embrace this same position of ‘in-between’. My position does not define my creative research, but it cannot help but inform it. 2 Essentialism, when related to feminist theory is defined as “the attribution of a fixed essence to women, whether through women’s supposedly shared biology, nature, or psychology (such as empathy, nurturance, or noncompetitiveness)” (Kowaleski-Wallace 2009, 196). 3 Dianna Fuss (1989, 2-3) defines constructionism as the antithesis of essentialism, with constructionists being “concerned about all with the production and organisation of differences, and they therefore reject the idea that any essential or natural givens precede the processes of social determination. 4 And can be seen to be versions of each other, in fact. 5 ‘Essence’ is defined by Fuss (1989, 2) as “that which is most irreducible, unchanging and therefore constitutive of a person or thing.” 4 Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Contextual Review If context is “the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood,”6 then it makes sense that when providing context for this project I should be writing about my interaction with the world at large. It is my understanding that every interaction, every setting, every view, every moment of happiness, sadness and frustration has led me to this point of understanding of the world and has had a significant impact on this research project. I honour and acknowledge the complexity of these influences, however I clearly cannot record every moment and exchange of the last six years here. This chapter will briefly discuss key sections of the theoretical terrain I have been negotiating during this doctoral research. I will begin with a discussion of the male dominated field of art, focussing primarily on Minimalist practice, as this was the key influence and context for my work at the commencement of the research. I will discuss Postminimalist practice, moving to a focus on women who have used Postminimalist approaches as a method by which to critique power structures. I will identify a selection of feminist artists who have provided sanctuary for myself as a researcher and maker, and then I will contextualise my body of creative work using Tracey Emin’s, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ and Sophie Calle’s engagements with intimacy, vulnerability, love and narrative. Finally, I will discuss the largely neglected feminist humour of Lynda Benglis and VALIE EXPORT in order to make sense of the attraction humour holds for me. 6 Oxford Dictionary definition. Chapter 2: Contextual Review 5 THE MALE DOMINATED FIELD OF ART While the majority of graduates from art school are female, men still rank significantly higher than their female counterparts when it comes to gallery representation, exhibitions in public institutions and solo exhibitions, as highlighted in the CoUNTtess blog in this country in 2012 and, more recently, Micol Hebron’s Gallery Tally project in the United States. This is not a new phenomenon by any means; art made by women has been under-recognised for centuries, much owed to heteronormative patriarchal gender roles. As Bette Kauffman points out: The contemporary Western version of the role of “artist” emerged from the Renaissance and achieved modern form in the romantic movement of the nineteenth century (Gimpel 1968; Becker 1982). It is a male role, which is to say the conditions of producing art and the relations of power that have institutionalized art as a category of valued cultural products have historically favoured men as performers of the role (Kauffman 1995, 95). Women have long been fighting against specified gender roles, and definitions of the myth of “artist as male hero” and the “stereotypical dabbling lady painter” (Kauffman 1995, 95). While on the surface it may seem as though the fight has been won against these presupposed gender roles, as bell hooks points out, there is much work still to be done (hooks 1995, 26). Why have there been no Great Women Artists? In 1971 Art News published what would become one of the key feminist essays, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” by Linda Nochlin. Nochlin’s article was one of only ten articles in Art News in 1971 focussed on women artists, 6 Chapter 2: Contextual Review out of eighty-four articles published by the journal overall that year. In the article, Nochlin (2003) posed the question, “Why have there been no great women artists?” as a subject for broad discussion rather than a platform from which to come to come up with a singular answer. She contended that much feminist research involved the recovery of data that had been erased from the history7 books, revisiting the history of art to find those women who have been deliberately erased, and inserting them for future scholarship (Nochlin 2003, 230). Nochlin claims, however, that while revisionist history is an important task, “both adding to our knowledge of women’s achievement and of art history generally,” it fails to identify the underlying issue (Nochlin 2003, 230). She states: in actuality, as we all know, things as they are and as they have been, in the arts as in a hundred other areas, are stultifying, oppressive, and discouraging to all those, women among them, who did not have the good fortune to be born white, preferably middle class and, above all, male. The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions and our education – education understood to include everything that happens to us from the moment we enter this world of meaningful symbols, signs, and signals. The miracle is, in fact, that given the overwhelming odds against women, or blacks, that so many of both have managed to achieve so much sheer excellence, in those bailiwicks of white masculine prerogative like science, politics, or the arts (Nochlin 2003, 231). Therefore, while re-writing history is an important element of feminist scholarship, we must also be critiquing the structures that exclude women in the first place. 7 An example of the way in which language has long been used as generically masculine. Chapter 2: Contextual Review 7 In her analysis of why a number of “token” women artists manage to achieve in the field, Nochlin outlines the “white Western male viewpoint” as the generic viewpoint in art history, as in most other fields (Nochlin 2003, 229). She argues that while it is possible for women to become accomplished, the chance of this happening is negated by “specific and definable social institutions, be they art academies, systems of patronage, mythologies of the divine creator, artist as he-man or social outcast” (Nochlin 2003, 232). Despite these constraints, however, Nochlin asserts that all is not lost; she calls for women to be informed and armed, using this knowledge as a material for their research and their work. She asks that women put aside their “demons of self-doubt and guilt and outer monsters of ridicule or patronizing encouragement” so that they can they can “reveal institutional and intellectual weaknesses in general, and, at the same time […] destroy false consciousness” in order to build new institutions and achieve “true greatness” (Nochlin 2003, 233). This call to action was somewhat of a catalyst for this research project; it encouraged me to become and be open about doubt, hesitancy, vulnerability, etc. both in the creative works and the writing up of this PhD. The Boys’ Club There have been many times over the last six years of this project where I feel like the whole world is a boys’ club, including both the art world and the academy. I have questioned if this is why I never quite felt at ease in either of these worlds, because I can never be simply a member of either club; I am consistently being made aware of my gender. When I first started to exhibit my work in the public, I took on the persona of a male artist as a way to battle my feelings of doubt and dread; his name was Joe Valentine. Interestingly, Kauffman argues, “One way to combat the lady 8 Chapter 2: Contextual Review painter stereotype has been to embrace the social model of the male artist. Becoming an ‘honorary man’ involves defining oneself as an exception to gender norms, distancing oneself from the gender group and feminism, and somehow cultivating an unnatural yet female image” (Kauffman 1995, 103). bell hooks also notes that in developing her identity as a writer, she spent time getting to know and understand the strategies used by white men in her field in order to develop her skills (hooks 1995). By creating a male personality and pseudonym I invented a scenario that allowed me to develop my confidence. This strategy of pretence subsequently set the scene for my fictional ‘collaboration’ (or what I term ‘faux-llaboration’) with iconic male artists, personas and histories. In the earliest stages of my creative research, many of the male artists I faux-llaborated with were those most commonly connected with the legacy of Minimal Art. Minimalism/Minimal Art While my research has expanded and moved in different directions over the course of this project, my obsession with Minimalist Art is where it all began. Over the course of this project some observers have found my love of Minimal Art confronting and confusing. It is a complicated relationship. It is a strange phenomenon to both love and be critical of something, to feel physically drawn to it and at the same time repelled. However, it was through my relationship with Minimalism that I started to think about my own practice and its association with love (as a concept and a ‘material’), which in turn has become the heart of this research project. My relationship with Minimal Art, both its practice and its practitioners, reminded me of one or two romantic relationships I had been involved in. While the various artists who produced Minimal Art fiercely advocated for the autonomy of the object and the Chapter 2: Contextual Review 9 complete removal of the self (the artist) from the work, Minimal Art speaks to me as if the artist who made the work is speaking to me8. It’s a [visual] language that I have always understood, and as such have felt able to converse in; I find a space for quiet and contemplation in the forms. Life is complicated and messy, and Minimalist Art and its minimal forms provide a solid and much needed reprieve. Minimalism and Minimal Art can be difficult terms to unpack. This is largely due to the varied definitions of both the critics and the artists involved. This section will discuss a selection of key texts that deal with minimal sculptural art as they relate to my practice. Many terms were used in conjunction with what we now understand as Minimal Art, including “ABC Art, Cool Art, Primary Structures, and Rejective Art” (Meyer 2004, 3). Some of these were utilised for titles of exhibitions that brought together like-minded practices, while others were used critically by writers to condemn what they viewed as an uninspired new trend. The term Minimal Art comes from an essay written in 1965 by Richard Wollheim: “Minimal Art”. Wollheim focuses on the critique of Minimal Art and the public’s resistance to accepting it as an art form. He states that the: principle reason for resisting the claims of Minimal Art is that its objects fail to evince what we have over the centuries come to regard as an essential ingredient in art: work, or manifest effort. And here it is not an issue, as it was in certain Renaissance disputes, of whether the work is insufficiently or excessively banausic, but simply whether it took place at all. Reinhardt or Duchamp, it might be felt, did nothing, or not enough (Wollheim 1995, 395). 8 See Michael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” for further discussion on the presence and indeed “theatricality” of the work. 10 Chapter 2: Contextual Review His focus was not the work of those artists we now consider linked to this particular movement, but rather that of Ad Reinhardt and Marcel Duchamp. Regardless of his intention, the key principles that he raised regarding the making of work, such as the inclusion of low-content and the use of materials sourced from nature and/or the factory, were adopted by artists in the early to mid 1960s as a way of forging a new identity for art practice. Barbara Rose argued that this “new sensibility” of Minimal Art derived from Kasimir Malevich and Marcel Duchamp’s legacies (Rose 1995). She described artists who embraced the two dimensional format of painting within their reductive practice as having a direct relationship with Malevich, and artists that are now more commonly associated with Conceptual or Pop Art as descendants of Duchamp. The artists most commonly linked to Minimal Art include Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Robert Morris, Dan Flavin, Anne Truitt and Sol LeWitt, specifically during the period of 1963-68 (Meyer 2001, 3). While Rose did not discuss these artists in particular, it was clear that Wollheim’s and Rose’s descriptions of certain trajectories in art reinforced the sense of a major turning point in the art world of the 1960s. As avid researchers into Minimal Art, specifically sculpture, both Kenneth Baker and James Meyer make it very clear that Minimal Art (as we understand it today) should not be understood as a “movement”, but that it should be engaged with as a “historical moment, a brief outbreak of a critical thought and invention in the cavalcade of postwar American art” (Baker 1988, 9). Baker (1988, 9) declares that “because the artists, critics, events, and publications that contributed most to it were Chapter 2: Contextual Review 11 centered in Manhattan,” his main focus in discussing this “historical moment” is on the New York artists who are now primarily used as examples of the Minimalist artists. In his discussion of the impact of these artists had on the future of art, Meyer claims: we may also conceive ‘Minimalism’ as a critical debate in which the artists were leading participants: as each developed their work, the Minimalists became their own best advocates. At the same time, their work invited an unusual amount of critical attention (Meyer 2001, 6). The general consensus amongst both artists and critics is that Minimal Art was a result of two key factors: that it was a direct response to, and rejection of current painting and sculpture, particularly Abstract Expressionism, and an embrace of a newly industrialised America. Judd and Morris were integral to understanding the motivations of this select group of artists through their active contribution to the critical dialogue surrounding the work. Judd (2005, 181) declared the “new work” to be “neither painting nor sculpture”. He argued that this new approach to making was neither a “movement, school [nor] style,” declaring that the similarities between his works and others discussed by critics are too general to cluster them together in this way (Judd 2005, 181). Judd confirmed that the primary similarity between these artists was their desire to create change and produce something new in order to express their objection to the “old” work of the past (Judd 2005, 181). He discusses this in terms of power structures, stating that the “new work exceeds painting in plain power,” explaining that it isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot to look at to be compelling (Judd 2005, 181). Judd asserted that artwork can and should be viewed in its entirety, without distraction and would therefore be “more intense, clear and 12 Chapter 2: Contextual Review powerful” (Judd 2005, 181-187). Judd defines these new works as “specific objects” because of their materials and production. He claims that it is the particularity of materials such as “Formica, aluminium, cold-rolled steel, plexiglass, red and common brass” etc., and the fact that they are used directly in the form, that makes the resulting works “specific” (Judd 2005, 187). Judd suggests the significance of the materials used in creating meaning in Minimal Art is what distinguishes it from other art forms, in which the content is independent of the media used (Judd 2005, 188). Morris agrees with Judd’s description of “the new” mode of art in “Notes on Sculpture” (2005). He, like Judd, refers to “the new work” as a form of anti-painting and sculpture. However, while Judd is primarily concerned with the forms and materials of the work, Morris focuses on the scale of the object, which he describes as paramount to the elimination of intimacy and autobiography. While there was indeed much support of this “new work” from various critics, there was also substantial criticism of the work and its supporting scholarship. The primary criticisms related to the lack of artistry visible in the production of the work and the apparently simplistic conceptual basis for the work, as well as a lack of coherence in the movement as a whole. Michael Fried observes that there were clear contradictions in the approaches of Judd and Morris as the two key artists associated with what he describes as literalist art. Fried stated, “the literalist espousal of objecthood amounts to nothing other than a plea for a new genre of theatre; and theatre is now the negation of art” (Fried 1995, 126). In other words, he claimed that this new work was not art at all. His argument for this stems first from Morris’ essay “Notes on Sculpture” (1995), in which he discusses the work in relation to the experience of the viewer. It is this concern for the way that the viewer engages with Chapter 2: Contextual Review 13 the object that Fried takes issue with. He is outraged that artists focus on the viewer’s perception rather than on the autonomous object. Another criticism of Minimal Art, and one that is useful in the discussion of Minimalism in relation to my practice is the political evaluation of the artists and works involved in this period, primarily instigated by the Women’s Movement and, subsequently, Feminist Art. It is interesting to note here that while Truitt is named by Meyer as one of the leading practitioners linked to Minimal Art, her name is very rarely used in discussion of her abovementioned masculine cohort. In discussion of this scenario Meyer (2001, 8) states that “often treated as a special case, a Minimalist who does not quite fit, Truitt was actually a key reference of Minimalist debate.” He goes on to say that “although her work’s optical and allusive aims squarely oppose Minimalism’s desubjectivizing impulse, her invention of the whole geometric object in 1962, concurrently with Judd, makes her an interesting ‘case’ indeed” (Meyer 2001, 8). Meyer highlights Truitt’s being ‘othered’ from the history of Minimalism based on her sex, stating that her gender is a contributing factor for the way that her work was received and written about (Meyer 2001, 8). The gendered nature of Minimal Art is well understood, with two of the key writers on the topic, Lynn Zelevansky (1994) and Anna Chave (2000), describing it as a primarily masculine movement. Zelevansky (1994, 7) defines Minimalism as “a small group of mostly male artists who emerged within the New York art world at the beginning of the 1960s”. She discusses the artists’ desire to distance themselves from the “emotional and autobiographical emphases of Abstract Expressionism” through the creation of works that “focused on the material qualities of the object and 14 Chapter 2: Contextual Review favored reductive forms in an effort to limit metaphorical readings of their work” (Zelevansky 1994, 7). Chave (2000) focuses on the gendered inequalities in her article, “Minimalism and Biography”, unpacking the perceived differences in the content of the work, claiming that it was the insertion of the artist’s hand, or biography, that separated out one of the essential artists of the same period, Eva Hesse. Hesse’s place in the Minimalist framework is fraught with complications, particularly because of her desire to create her ‘own’ art, which included evidence of her involvement with the work. It was these complications that Lucy Lippard identified and began exploring in 1966. This exploration, in her writing and the curatorial project, Eccentric Abstraction, formed the basis for what is now understood as Postminimal Art. Postminimalism/Postminimalist Art If Minimalism is a difficult movement to clearly identify and discuss, Postminimalism is more fraught still. While it is a term that is often used when discussing various practices, it is perhaps so widely used that it has begun to lose meaning. It is however, most often used to describe art practices that somehow engage with the legacy of Minimalism. As such it is an important point of reference for this research project, my initial engagement with Minimalism having evolved into an investigation and critique of its power and influence. This section will explore a sample of key texts that are used when discussing Postminimal practice, in order to ascertain its meaning for, and potential relationship with my own creative practice. Chapter 2: Contextual Review 15 Postminimalism has had varying definitions in terms of its place in the history of art, with some critics defining it as a period in art history, and others discussing it as an approach that is still relevant to a continuing art practice. In his article, The State of the Art: 1980, Kim Levin (1980, 367) defines Postminimalism as being “any or all of a torrent of reactions to Minimalism that occurred in the late sixties, including process art, scatter works, earthworks, Conceptualism, and body art, each a logical extension of the reductive Minimalist ethic and a protest against formalism, rejecting an art of objects.” He goes on to say that Postminimalism “turned to the temporal, the ephemeral, and the natural. In a way it was a back-to-nature movement, but primarily it was a critique of form” (Levin 1980, 367). Irving Sandler (1996, 17) discusses the early understanding of Postminimalism as being primarily in relation to the form of the object, but also states “a few art professionals did remark that the perishable materials suggested the vulnerable fragility, and the impermanence of humankind.” Curator and critic, Lucy Lippard, took an interest in these new works that maintained a clear connection to the Minimalist form while incorporating subjectivity and vulnerability. What is generally understood today as Postminimal Art was first identified and explored in the exhibition curated by Lippard in 1966, Eccentric Abstraction. Most discussions of Postminimalism begin with this exhibition as a pivotal moment, however the term, “Postminimalism” wasn’t coined until 1987, in Richard PincusWitten’s book, Postminimalism into Maximalism: American Art, 1966-1986. Eccentric Abstraction was a trend that Lippard identified as a clear reaction to the rigid and objective nature of Minimalism. The exhibition presented artworks by Alice Adams, Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Gary Kuehn, Bruce Nauman, Don Potts, 16 Chapter 2: Contextual Review Keith Sonnier, and Frank Lincoln Viner, most relatively unknown artists at the time (Williams 2000, 40). Lippard began the companion essay, which was printed after the exhibition was launched, with the following statement: The rigours of structural art would seem to preclude entirely any aberration toward the exotic. Yet in the last three years, an extensive group of artists on both East and West Coasts, largely unknown to each other, have evolved a nonsculptural style that has a good deal in common with the primary structure as well as, surprisingly, with aspects of surrealism. The makers of what I am calling, for semantic convenience, eccentric abstraction, refuse to eschew imagination and the extension of sensuous experience while they also refuse to sacrifice the solid formal basis demanded of the best in current non-objective art (Lippard in Morgan 1998, 86). The significance of the Surrealists in Lippard’s understanding of Postminimalist work is exemplified by the inclusion of Louise Bourgeois in the exhibition. Considering Lippard’s involvement in and support of Minimalist practice, particularly through her assistance of Kynaston McShine in the curation of a key exhibition of Minimalist work, Primary Structures, also in 1966, it is interesting that she diverts her attention to this new form. Robert Morgan asserts that: In making a curatorial statement about eccentric abstraction as having some opposition to the more prevailing tendency of Minimalism, Lippard appropriated some indirect references to the kind of structural norm that artists such as Judd and Morris advocated in their break from the relational sculpture of the past. All eight artists seemed to espouse a type of modularity, repetition, and/or refinement of a formal idea about Chapter 2: Contextual Review 17 sculpture. But the absence of a rigid geometry or sameness of materials was also pronounced (Morgan 1998, 80). Lippard can therefore be seen as a key contributor to the contemporary understanding of Postminimalism, opening up the discussion of the new at a time when Minimalism still held a dominant place in art making and criticism. In discussing the works included in Eccentric Abstraction, Briony Fer asserts: If objecthood was a term used to describe the literalness of the object, its mere thing-like status, then this work moved beyond objecthood, not by repairing the rift and returning to the object its aesthetic plenitude, but by taking it even further down the road of literalness itself and into a realm of excessive, bodily materiality (Briony Fer 1999, 26). She argues Lippard’s show was therefore a major turning point, and “laid the ground for a whole range of work which has subsequently come to be labelled Postminimalism” (Fer 1999, 26). Morris was not included in Lippard’s groundbreaking exhibition Eccentric Abstraction; however, he is still regarded as one of the key figures in Postminimalism. Because of his prominence in Minimalism as both an artist and writer, Morris’ contribution to the new method of making in Postminimalism is most instructive, as it clearly shows the progression from stand alone, fabricated, objectbased works to works that clearly incorporate the artist’s hand. Morris’ hands on critique of the autonomous object has become pivotal to my understanding of the complex relationship between Minimalist and Postminimalist practice. As Sandler states: 18 Chapter 2: Contextual Review Morris had come to believe that Minimal sculpture was not as physical as art could or should be because of the formation and arrangement of its rigid modular or serial units was not inherent in their material. To make a work more physical, the process of the work’s “making itself” had to be emphasized. Morris called for a literal art whose focus was on matter— more specifically, on malleable materials—and the action of gravity on matter. Such an art, whose ordering was “casual and imprecise and unemphasized,” could not be predetermined (Sandler 1996, 22). Therefore, the first phase of Postminimal practice, incorporating process art, conceptual art, landscape art, body art, etc. can be seen to be a clear and direct deviation from the objectives of Minimal Art through the use of ephemeral materials. In the early 1970s, artists became less interested in discussion of the “anti-object” and began once again to engage with traditional objects, combined with the abovementioned approaches, and through this, “Minimalism was re-evaluated” (Sandler 1996, 74). It is this re-evaluation that Pincus-Witten discusses in his analysis of Postminimal practice. Pincus-Witten (1987) describes this “new” form of making as fundamentally opposed to the formalist values of Minimalist Art in the mid-1960s (Pincus Witten 1987, 9). He states that this new approach involved “activities stressing autobiography, the artistic persona, and psyche” (Pincus-Witten 1987, 9). He points out that while “certain aspects of Postminimalism are also readily seen to derive from Minimalism’s essential reductive and analytical character, others less immediately so.” He describes Postminimalism as a term that can be used to cover “a multitude of stylistic resolutions preceded and posited by an apparent generative Chapter 2: Contextual Review 19 style”, and within this framework identifies a number of varied approaches and phases (Pincus-Witten 1987, 10). The first, occurring in the late 1960s was a revival of painterly expressionistic approaches through the sculptural form, the second, in the early 1970s, was one that became interested and engaged with “informationorientated abstraction, one that loosely honored, say, mathematical set theory, 0 and 9 formulas, Fibonacci series, systems emphasizing red-yellow-blue primaries,” with the third phase exploring and re-evaluating “theatrical issues” in combination with “body art” (Pincus-Witten 1987, 10-12). In summary, Pincus-Witten claims that Postminimal Art “can be read as (1) the advent of the ‘pictorial/sculptural’ mode; (2) the emergence of an abstract, information-based epistemology; and (3) its counterpoises, body art and conceptual theatre” (Pincus-Witten 1987, 12). Crucially, Pincus-Witten states that Postminimalism’s “relationship to the women’s movement cannot be overly stressed,” arguing, albeit briefly, that Postminimalism’s “formal attitudes and properties, not to mention its exemplars, derive from methods and substances that hitherto and had been sexistically tagged as female or feminine, whether or not the work had been made by women” (Pincus-Witten 1987, 11). However, although he identifies the relationship and impact of the Women’s Movement on Postminimal practice, Pincus-Witten leaves the implications unexplored. Zelevansky and Chave take up this train of thought for analysis. Zelevansky makes a pressing argument for the relevance of the Women’s Movement to the development of Postminimal practice. In the catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties, Zelevansky (1994, 7) writes, “if the Minimalism of the first half of the 1960s was largely a male preserve, Post-minimalism, which coalesced toward the end of the 20 Chapter 2: Contextual Review decade, at approximately the same time of the women’s Movement, was in part defined by women.” She describes Postminimal practice an extension of Minimalism, but one that included the “artist’s ‘touch’” and “sometimes evoked the ‘primal,’ and could be emphatically hand-made” (Zelevansky 1994, 7). Zelevansky explains that Postminimal practice afforded women artists, for the first time, the opportunity to have some impact on the direction of the art world, through both a “critical dialogue and the marketplace” (Zelevansky 1994, 9). She claims that the relevance of women to this particular approach to making was not simply in the “feminizing of the material stuff of Minimalism,” but also a factor of one of the key approaches of Feminist practice: the exploration and exposure of “inherent biases, among them the notion of genius as gender-specific” (Zelevansky 1994, 7-10). Chave (2000) discusses the overarching gender divisions and assumptions of the 1960s. She describes the Minimalist movement in particular as being one that was heavily dominated by men, but also discusses the impact of the relationships that these artists entered into with women writers and curators, and how this was seen to benefit their (the men’s) careers; pointing out that both sides benefited from these relationships. Chave points to the attitudes of key women contributors to this period such as Lippard, Judy Chicago and Rosalind Krauss, to further emphasise the gender divisions. She notes Lippard’s and Chicago’s early denial of the role of gender in their careers, identifying that both had developed successful and respected careers in the art world, but that there was a point in each of their careers (around 1970), where they began to resist the notion that they needed to deny their personal experiences in order to be taken seriously within their field (Chave 2000, 151). She also considers the role of Krauss’ contribution to this period in time, discussing Krauss’ relationship Chapter 2: Contextual Review 21 to Clement Greenberg as his “disciple” and her developing relationship with one of the key figures in terms of the discussion of Postminimalist practice, Morris (Chave 2000, 153). Chave’s article seeks to identify and contrast the elements within the work of Morris and Hesse, as well as their approach/presentation to the world of both their art and themselves as artists. Chave uses these two figures to identify the distinct differences in the reading of Hesse and Morris as artists, as well as in the content of their work. She states that Hesse was pivotal in the disruption of Minimal Art: “the discursive proceedings-as-usual have to do with the risk she took in insinuating into an ostensibly desubjectivized, sexually neutral, or indifferent visual modality an emphasis on the personal, implicitly including the mark of difference: her identity as a woman” (Chave 2000, 159). Women and Postminimalist Practice A number of women artists who have been connected to Postminimalist practice have been essential to my understanding of the creative outcomes of this research, particularly in the early years of this project. Eva Hesse, Janine Antoni, Mona Hatoum and Rachel Whiteread have each informed my understanding of the potential of a feminist engagement with the modernist canon, particularly in response to Minimalist Art. Eva Hesse Eva Hesse is a key artist in the discussion of Minimalist and Postminimalist practice. While sometimes associated with Minimal Art, her works often problematise the rigid positions that are set up by Minimalism. Martha Buskirk discusses Hesse in terms of this difference, stating that it was the combination of materials, process, and 22 Chapter 2: Contextual Review form that reshapes “the established geometries of Minimalism into playfully absurd repetition,” thus implying that Hesse can be understood through her point of difference to Minimalist practice (Buskirk 2003, 134). Hesse’s point of difference is often described as being related to her gender. Briony Fer responds to these discussions of Hesse’s position amongst the men of Minimalism, arguing, “there is little to be gained […] in setting up Hesse as the ‘feminine’ to counter the ‘masculine’ hard surfaces to which LeWitt, Andre, and others were drawn” as “Hesse was drawn to modern hard surfaces too—galvanized steel, aluminium, and many other industrial materials.” She also proposes that, even though Hesse’s choice of materials may have sometimes differed from those used by her male counterparts, this should not be reason enough to separate her from discussions and analysis of Minimalism as a movement. Fer asserts that although Hesse may have incorporated ephemeral materials within her work, other artists also used materials of this kind. She suggests that, rather than fixating on how Hesse is dissimilar to Minimalism’s artists, we should be assessing how the movement itself represents difference (Fer 2002). Figure 2.1 Eva Hesse Expanded Expansion 1969 http://joannemattera.blogspot.com.au/2006/11/new-yorks-extended-minimal-moment.html Chapter 2: Contextual Review 23 Figure 2.2 Eva Hesse Expanded Expansion 1969 (In its current state) http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/SAVING-THE-SOUL-3292515.php In Expanded Expansion (1969) Hesse combines the rigid forms of fibreglass poles with a rubberised cheesecloth that connects the poles in a draping, curtain-like manner. Buskirk discusses the work in terms of its ephemeral qualities, stating that: Photographs that show the pale expanses of draped material in Expanded Expansion give hints of its provocative pliability in this early appearance—even if, in the decades since, dramatic transformations in this and many other of Hesse’s works caused by the yellowing of the fiberglass and the increasing fragility or decay of latex and rubber elements show the paradox of work that derived its power from the use of materials that will alter over time (Buskirk 2003, 134). It is the combination of these ephemeral qualities in much of Hesse’s work and her significance to the discussion surrounding gender in relation to Minimalist and Postminimalist practices that are of interest to me in the context of this project. The contradictions inherent to both Hesse’s voice in relation to the ‘feminine’ (or lack thereof) within her work, as well as her impact on interpretations and arguments 24 Chapter 2: Contextual Review regarding art practice, intrigue me. In my own practice I have conflicting feelings about my engagement as a ‘female artist’. I am both enamoured by the art object and repelled by its patriarchal context, which ties into my contradictory feelings about the [male] modernist canon, the masculine nature of Minimal Art and the ramifications that these feelings have on my practice as an emerging female practitioner. Janine Antoni Janine Antoni is known for her performative use of her body as well her utilisation of ‘feminine’ materials within her work to explore issues relating to gender, particularly in relation to the history of art and popular culture. Ewa Layer-Burcharth (2001) discusses Antoni’s approach not only in relation to her re-evaluation of the modernist (male) legacy, but also in terms of her connection to the feminist legacy. She states that throughout her practice Antoni is partaking in a dialogue with heavily maledominated art movements such as Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism and her feminist forebears, acknowledging her lineage as well as expressing a desire to separate herself from them so as to provide her own distinct voice (Lajer-Burcharth 1998, 143). Chapter 2: Contextual Review 25 Figure 2.3 Janine Antoni Gnaw 1992 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/eascfa/feminist_art_base/gallery/janineantoni.php?i=642 Antoni’s Gnaw (1992) is one such work that references Minimalism “in the use of geometric forms that take command of their surrounding space” (Buskirk 2003, 7). The work consists of two 600-pound cubes, one lard, and the other chocolate. Antoni has carved the works by gnawing at them with her teeth (Weintraub et al 1996, 125). Through the act of gnawing, Antoni shifts the cube from a pure Minimalist representation of form to a revision or re-contextualisation of it, through both her choice of materials and the clear evidence of the artists’ involvement. Antoni used organic materials with a large range of cultural associations rather than the industrial materials core to Minimal Art. Her physical interaction with the work, removing the surface of the object, can be directly linked to the legacy of feminist performance: a literal eradicating of the surface of art. By engaging with the cube in this way, Antoni is destroying the rigid nature of the geometric form. Ewa Layer-Burcharth (2001, 132) discusses this work in terms of Antoni’s engagement with the legacy of Minimalism as a move to make obvious her “difference” as an artist. She states that “both repulsion and desire are in her gnaw” (Layer-Burcharth 2001, 132). Layer- 26 Chapter 2: Contextual Review Burcharth adds, “the artist herself describes the bite as an articulation of her ambiguous relation to Minimalism as an artistic tradition associated with male artists: ‘I feel attached to my artistic heritage and I want to destroy it. It defines me as an artist and excludes me as a woman, all at the same time’” (Layer-Burcharth 2001, 132). While I do not attempt to destroy the legacies of those who have come before me, I connect with Antoni’s frustration at being excluded because of our sex. I engage with the legacies of the modernist canon in order to explore and find my position as a young, female artist as well as to highlight the continuing inequities that exist in the art world. Mona Hatoum Mona Hatoum is often associated with performance and video practice however, it is her sculptural works that are of primary interest to me in connection to female engagement with the modernist legacy, particularly Minimalism. Lynn Zelevansky states that: In the late eighties, after years of working with performance and video, Mona Hatoum made a shift away from specific narrative, gradually moving from time-based art to installations and sculpture that are more open-ended in their associations. She has returned to the Minimalism that absorbed her as a student, encoding it with rich personal and political implications (Zelevansky 1994, 14). Zelevansky (1994, 18) further discusses this aspect of Hatoum’s practice in relation to Postminimalism, saying that it “allowed” for the insertion of “social and biological concerns” into geometric, Minimalist-like objects. What is perhaps most relevant to this project is the connection Zelevansky makes between Hatoum and Hesse, Chapter 2: Contextual Review 27 revealing that Hatoum “feels an affinity with Eva Hesse because, in Hesse’s work, the rational, symbolised by the order of the grid and the repetition of the modules, is combined with bodily references that introduce “an unruliness, a chaotic element into the grid and geometric structures” (Zelevansky 1994, 18). While I don’t attempt to insert this unruliness into my works, I understand the combination of forms, materials and processes in my practice as acting out my interest in controlling chaos in a way that most definitely inserts myself into the work at some level, be it through the obviously non-fabricated works, the materials that I have chosen, or the title that accompanies the work. Figure 2.4 Mona Hatoum Socle du monde (Base of the World) 1992-93 http://chothietke.vn/nghe-thuat-sap-dat-p3-buc-be-cung-la-van-de-677.htm Hatoum’s Socle du monde (Base of the World) (1992-93) is a tribute to Piero Manzoni’s 1961 work of the same name. It provides clear evidence for Zelevansky’s argument regarding Hatoum’s interest in the rigid form inserted with bodily references. Buskirk notes that: 28 Chapter 2: Contextual Review The importance of Minimalism, both its initial hard-edged mode and Hesse’s inversion of that logic, is equally evident in works that incorporate references to the body, as in the intestine like pattern taken by the magnetized iron filings covering the large cube that is Hatoum’s 1992-1993 Socle du monde (Buskirk 2003, 254). Socle du monde (Base of the World) is a “huge, seemingly static cube, the surface of which is teeming with iron filings held in place by powerful magnets embedded in the sculpture” (Zelevansky 1994, 18). I particularly enjoy Zelevansky’s description of the work as being “decidedly mutable and intestine-like” (Zelevansky 1994, 18). She also refers to it as being potentially a “reversal of Hesse’s Accession II” (1969), stating that while Hesse’s “guts” are uncovered through the opening at the top of the cube, Hatoum’s object “wears its entrails on the outside” (Zelevansky 1994, 18). Rachel Whiteread Rachel Whiteread overtly engages with the legacy of Minimalist and Postminimalist practice, and is of interest and relevance to my current line of enquiry, because Whiteread’s work, like my own responds not only to Minimalism but Postminimalism as well. Whiteread could then be discussed as a Post-Postminimalist artist; her works are not only direct responses to Minimal Art and its artists, but rather operate in direct dialogue with Postminimal forms and their artists. This connection can clearly be seen in her referencing of Nauman’s A Cast of the Space Under my Chair (1965-68) from Lippard’s abovementioned exhibition, Eccentric Abstraction. Throughout her career, Whiteread has repeatedly returned to this notion of casting the space around the object; it is almost as if she is objectifying the process of de-objectification. Chapter 2: Contextual Review 29 Figure 2.5 Bruce Nauman A Cast of the Space under my Steel Chair 1965-68 http://au.phaidon.com/agenda/art/picture-galleries/2014/february/26/the-bruce-nauman-picturegallery/?idx=7&idx=7 A clear example of this direct engagement with Nauman’s work is Whiteread’s Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) (1995), which is a “series of rectangular resin blocks cast from the undersides of chairs and arrayed across the gallery space” (Buskirk 2003). As opposed to Nauman’s singular, neutral coloured sculptural inclusion in Eccentric Abstraction, Whiteread’s Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) is a large-scale installation of similarly shaped, colourful objects placed in a repetitive grid-like formation. Lisa Tickner (2006, 100) discusses the work in terms of its multiplicity, its brightness and its contradictory nature as both sombre and light-hearted. She says: Whiteread’s work is calculatedly ‘and-and’ and ‘neither-nor.’ Casting is neither carving (virile) nor modeling (‘feminine’), neither fully form (sculpture) nor fully surface (painting), not quite abstraction or figuration, reproductive yet inventive, simultaneously iconic and indexical (like the photograph), and this undecidability—the collapsing of these opportunities—is, as Fer points out, what Whiteread’s work most fully is (Tickner 2006, 100). 30 Chapter 2: Contextual Review It is this undecidability that provides the most useful connection and supporting framework for my current approaches to making. Tickner (2006, 93) also discusses Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) as a “parody of the assumption that women elaborate, color, and interpret, rather than originate structure and form”. Whiteread’s denial of a particular position in the conversation of gendered critique of the legacy of Minimal Art is what initially drew me to her practice. This combined with her playful responses to the presumption that women ‘feminise’ the formal elements of art history results in a contextual framework for my interest in combining a genuine love of formal elements with conceptual rigour, including a combination of homage and critique. Figure 2.6 Rachael Whiteread Untitled (One Hundred Spaces) 1995 http://www.saatchigallery.com/aipe/rachel_whiteread.htm Hesse, Antoni, Hatoum and Whiteread engage directly with the kind of physical structures common in Minimal Art in order to position themselves in relation to a significant movement in modern art. They disrupt the minimal forms through their choice of materials, by inserting the body and/or the subjective, with a subtle sense of humour. The slippages between formal engagement and form as critique, and the Chapter 2: Contextual Review 31 genuine appreciation and connection with the works these artists respond to in their work provide a key material context for my work. FEMINISTS CAN BE FUNNY Feminist Art Feminist Art was closely linked to the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s (Parker and Pollock 1987, 276). This was a time when women artists began to challenge the narratives of art history, especially those of 20th century modernism (Broude and Garrard 1994, 276). The work produced at this time was diverse; it was loud and proud at times, and subtle and full of innuendo at others. Feminist Art of this time was groundbreaking, providing pathways for future generations of women, affording them the ability to engage with the world in a way not previously available to them. Until this period, women had been repeatedly erased from the history books with only men’s names included in the teaching of art history. Feminist scholarship has corrected some of this amnesia over time. And while one or two women artists are almost always included in exhibitions today, this has lead to a discussion around tokenism, with women and feminists seeking full and nuanced consideration of their work and their influence as integral contributors to the history and practice of art (Rosen and Brawer 1989, 10). As Grace Hartigan amusingly declared, “If you’re an exceptionally gifted woman, the door is open. What women are fighting for is the right to be as mediocre as men” (Hartigan in Rosen and Brawer 1989, 10). Thus it can be seen that Feminist art was and is produced with multiple and varied motivations and results. Engaging with Feminist Art and developing my own feminist sensibility within my 32 Chapter 2: Contextual Review own practice over the course of this project has been an eye opening and mindexpanding journey. Katy Deepwell states that, “feminism is not a singular approach but a broad umbrella term for a diverse number of positions and strategies amongst women involved in the production, distribution and consumption of art” (Deepwell 1995, 1). There are numerous feminisms and, subsequently, numerous approaches to making Feminist Art, ranging from work that is explicitly critical of patriarchy, to that which focuses more on revealing subjective gendered experiences, to that which perhaps was not originally intended to be feminist, but which subtly yet firmly claims a political position on its own. I have spent much time over the course of the last six years researching and trying to identify what feminist art actually is; the discussions and debates between writers, researchers and makers have led me to understand that Feminist Art is a deeply complicated and hard to define. One of clearest definitions I have found however, is this one by Judy Chicago. Chicago proposes that feminist art: is art that reaches out and affirms women and validates our experience and makes us feel good about ourselves. Feminist art teaches us that the basis of our culture is grounded in a pernicious fallacy—a fallacy which causes us to believe that alienation is the human condition and real human contact is unattainable. This fallacy has divided our feelings from our thoughts, this fallacy has caused the planet to be divided as are the sexes. Feminist art is art that leads us to a future where these opposites can be reconciled and ourselves and the world thereby made whole (Chicago n.d). The constructive sentiment behind this statement underpins what I have found to be at the heart of feminisms today; including not only discussion of gender but also that Chapter 2: Contextual Review 33 of race, culture, sexuality etc. Feminisms and Feminist Art may be multi-faceted, complicated, and at times contradictory but it is always political. As Randy Rosen proposes that: The work of many women artists during the 1970s and ‘80s helped foster this reengagement between art and life by reemphasizing subjective and social concerns that had been outside the modernist visual lexicon. Women made subject matter respectable again. As members of a new pluralist avant-garde they enlarged the possibilities of art, helping to define a new mainstream that encompassed their work. For the first time in decades, ingrained notions of art history were challenged. Suddenly there was no dominant style (Rosen 1989, 11). Feminist Art can be based in or reflect on the personal or the communal, it can be overt or subtly hiding in conversations that appear to be referencing something else, it can be in the intent or the reading of the action/work and it can be a feeling that overcomes the reader/viewer upon engagement. The personal is [still] political and this research project has prompted me to believe that contemporary art, including my own, should be personal and it should be political. The development of my voice, and my understanding of its relevance to me as a person, a researcher and an artist has been integral to my understanding of both myself, and the world more broadly. By inserting my subjectivity into the work, by making the personal political, I have created a body of work that is open, vulnerable, imperfect, and real; to make work any other way now seems a waste of an opportunity for transformation, of ourselves and the world around us. 34 Chapter 2: Contextual Review Humour in Feminist Art I have come to recognise humour as a key aspect of this research project, theoretically and creatively. In 1982 Jo Anna Isaak was responsible for the exhibition The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter, and a book of the same name, while in 2013 Laura Castagnini curated Backflip: Feminism and Humour in Contemporary Art in Melbourne, an exhibition that explored humour in performative practice, from the 1970s until now. Other than these two examples, little has been done in the analysis of the relevance of humour to feminist art practice. I believe, however, that humour is a potent strategy for feminist art practices. Feminists can indeed be funny, in their critique of patriarchy and as part of a reflexive and ironic, deconstructive, approach to making art; humour is an effective strategy for engaging a broader audience. It has been suggested that Postmodernism had a profound impact on the progression of both visual and broader political discourse in a way that foregrounded humour. Sheri Klein (2007, 24) describes postmodernism as a “wide umbrella term for the wide range of art produced between 1980 and the present.” She argues that Postmodernism focused on previously marginalised groups in culture and “gave birth to the notion that the critique and deconstruction of the art world, social constructs and society was necessary” (Klein 2007, 24). For groups who had never held a position of power, Postmodernism created a new and levelled playing field by directly challenging the division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, thus exposing the position of the subject as one conditional on class, gender, race etc. Women were one such group who benefited from this exposé (Isaak 1996, 2). Jo Anna Isaak concurs, claiming that postmodernism created a “new authority-free zone,” in which women Chapter 2: Contextual Review 35 began to deconstruct “the prison house of language through play, or laughter” (Isaak 1996, 2) While there are a myriad of women artists who use humour as a material and/or strategy in their practice, it is artists such as VALIE EXPORT and Lynda Benglis whose works employ an explicitly critical humour, one that is ambiguous, shifting and at times confusing, that I look to as references for my own research. Their work is often discussed and heralded for its use of the body as the primary material for political action, or for the aggressive nature of their offerings; however, it is the humour both inserted and found in these acts that appeals to me. And it is the ongoing silence around the humour of this work that has lead me to understand that this seemingly uncomfortable terrain, of critique and humour is one that warrants further investigation. VALIE EXPORT VALIE EXPORT’s9 work is strong, critical and an important reference point for much of the art that has utilised the body as material in art since the late 1960s. EXPORT pioneered the field of Feminist Art, particularly live performance, moving image and photography, presenting the body as the primary strategy for critiquing the objectification through the male gaze of women’s bodies in media and in society more broadly. As Roselee Goldberg asserts, “In the late ‘60s, Export was one of the few European artists dealing with feminist issues. Her “expanded cinema,” video, and performances critiqued “male spectatorship” in a most direct way” (Goldberg 9 VALIE EXPORT invented her name in 1967, as “an artistic concept and logo to be written in capital letters only” (http://www.valieexport.at/en/biografie/). 36 Chapter 2: Contextual Review 2004, 118). EXPORT’s work is combative, and often involves her naked body and/or abject engagements with the body. Her work can be difficult to watch but always makes for powerful viewing; as Spielman claims, in “the deconstruction […] of existing representations”, EXPORT constructs “reality visibly and audibly” with the intention of, “on one hand, pushing the audience’s willingness to watch to its limits and, on the other, equally taking the physical experience of her body into border situations” (Spielman 2008, 152). I find works that use the naked woman’s body as a strategy for disrupting the objectification of women uncomfortable, as if the artists who utilise this method are somehow re-objectifying themselves for the viewer, who still maintains a patriarchal gaze10. As Lucy Lippard argues, “a woman using her own face and body has a right to do what she will with them, but it is a subtle abyss that separates men’s use of women for sexual titillation from women’s use of women to expose that insult” (Lippard 1976, 75). While of course women have the right to use their own bodies as they wish, I am concerned by how these bodies are viewed, and the impact this will have on the ongoing battle in the objectification of women in art, and society. Where the intention may be to empower and reclaim the female body, while we are still operating in a heteronormative patriarchal society we cannot escape the presence of the male gaze, which “calls upon its audience to ‘see’ (whether literally or figuratively) the woman represented […] as primarily a sex object” (Eaton 2012, 293). There are some exceptions however, where the work is so clear in its critique of patriarchal structures that the power lays in the naked body, rather than in any 10 Despite my reaction to such works, I would not impose my own views onto another. I align with EXPORT’s statement, “Let women speak so that they can find themselves, this is what I ask for in order to achieve a self-defined image of ourselves and thus a different view of the social function of women” (in Wentrack 2006, 138). Chapter 2: Contextual Review 37 view of that body. I believe that VALIE EXPORT is one such exception. The power that is conveyed in each of her works clearly and confidently disrupts this gaze. Figure 2.7 VALIE EXPORT Aktionshose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic) 1969 http://secretphotosforbreakfast.tumblr.com/post/19368014511/foxesinbreeches-valie-exportaktionshose One of EXPORT’s most discussed works is Actionhose: Genitalpanik (Action Pants: Genital Panic) (1969), a series of photographs that were taken several months after an action11 of the same name. EXPORT describes the action in an interview with Devon Fore. In 1969, I was invited to a film screening. I was wearing the action pants as a cinema action and I entered the movie theater saying, “Was Sie sonst auf der Leinwand sehen, sehen Sie hier in der Realität” [“Now you will see in reality what you normally see on the screen”]. It was a movie theater in Munich with a completely normal audience, so I walked through the seats, on display—nothing else, just on display. And some of the people in the audience got up, or at least all the ones in the back 11 See VALIE EXPORT. 1989. “Aspects of Feminist Actionism”. New German Critique. 47: 69-72 for additional information on EXPORT’s Feminist Actionism. 38 Chapter 2: Contextual Review because they could get out the easiest. [laughs] The fact that this was reality was something that was unbearable to them. The action was designed to challenge the voyeurism of cinema. I was trying to develop a completely new, nonvoyeuristic approach to the female body as something other than a visual object. I wanted to find out what happened when you leave behind this voyeuristic mode and confront people with reality. But the fact of the matter is that they just walked away from it. That’s what was so interesting for me to discover: People don’t want to see reality. All of the time they just don’t want to see reality. It’s a pretty simple idea, really, this question of how we deal with reality. When something is constructed, when it’s projected onto a screen, it’s acceptable, but it’s different when it’s there in front of you in a public space (Fore n.d. para 19). There was no documentation of the work, and over the years, the description because filled with inaccuracies regarding the date of the action and the venue (it became a pornography theatre rather than an art house cinema in some accounts). Some inaccurate accounts also state that EXPORT wielded a gun (most likely in response to the staged image above), however this was not the case (Wentrack 2006, 214). While EXPORT’s body of work is broad, critically robust and integral to our understanding of contemporary practice that uses the body as the primary material for making art, feminist performance, and redefining the female form as a visceral, feeling and sexual body rather than, “the material ‘woman,’ subjugated and enslaved by the male creator” (EXPORT 1989, 71), this is one of only two of her works given the attention they deserve. And although given critical attention, this work is often discussed in a way that trivialises the artist’s intent and overlooks other potential Chapter 2: Contextual Review 39 readings of the work. LaBelle (2001, para 1) asks, “is it an act of female empowerment or feminine hysteria?” and thus continues the age-old connection of women’s strength and voice to hysteria. I find the idea of the performance and each of the images of this series (which were taken indoors and outdoors in various positions, with gun in hand and pubic area exposed), hilarious, strong, critical, vital, and funny! The combination of her hair, the look on her face, and the outfit in its entirety, bare feet and crotchless pants included, amount to a solid representation of feminist humour, and yet the only discussion that I can find referencing the potential connection between EXPORT’s practice and humour is when it is referred to as a “muffled” humour (Mueller 1994, 209). Humour is subjective of course, but it seems peculiar that this element of the work isn’t more readily shared and embraced. The silence on the issue suggests that a strong, aggressive woman can’t possibly be funny. I do not refer to the humour in the work in order to remove its critical position, but rather to enhance it as critically engaging with the humourous side of feminist art can strengthen the political importance of the works. By doing so, it can be demonstrated that feminist critique can be multi-faceted. Humour is indeed a productive strategy, and as Isaak (2013, 30) claims, “the revolutionary power of women’s laughter does not function like the tendentious joke; this laughter is first and foremost a communal response. The aim is inclusion, not exclusion.” It is from this understanding of humour that has prompted it to become an important strategy in my engagement with a reverent critique of the modernist canon, not with the sole purpose of making fun of the [still patriarchal] institution of art, but rather to connect with my community of women in our shared experience. 40 Chapter 2: Contextual Review Lynda Benglis Lynda Benglis has long epitomised my understanding of a gendered engagement with the canon, particularly the canon of Minimalist practice. Known for her poured floor paintings, vertical wax works, polyurethane sculptures and advertisements, her practice presents a wide variety of wall-based, sculptural, photographic and video works that “disrupt the appearance of male-dominated Minimalism, with its multiple technological and mathematical references” (Taylor 2005, 29). As described by Dave Hickey, Benglis responded directly to the “parents” and “grandparents” of art, such as Willem de Kooning, Helen Frankenthaler, Andy Warhol and Donald Judd, slaying their legacies in a “ruthless aesthetic cleansing” (Hickey 2009, 11). She disrupted the accepted structures of art, presenting works that were not overtly political in their appearance, but instead focussed on form and process, combined with various symbolic elements12. Benglis intentionally disrupts the physical forms of art by using materials and strategies that were at odds with the [hero] art that was being produced at the time. She loudly objected to the boys club, formally and conceptually. However, Benglis’ feminism[s] was “not limited to the female identity of the artist nor to content or form but […] operates to destabilise matter, or rather matters of aesthetics” (Lebovici 2009, 100). 12 Such as the sunglasses in the Artforum Advertisement in: Artforum, November 1974, Vol.13, No.3, S. 3-4. (1974), which referenced “lies made by Nixon’s government” in the wearing of “Martha Mitchell sunglasses,” or the miniature Porsche in Primary Structures (1975), which referred to Nixon’s closing down of “gas stations after 1 or 2 o’clock in the morning, so nobody had enough gas to get on and off the highway at certain hours” (Benglis and Kim 2009). Chapter 2: Contextual Review 41 Figure 2.8 Lynda Benglis Artforum Advertisement in: Artforum, November 1974, Vol.13, No.3, S. 34. 1974 http://dailyserving.com/2011/03/knots-landing-lynda-benglis-at-the-new-museum/ Benglis’ practice as a whole has made a tremendous impact on me as an artist, a feminist, and a researcher. Advertisement in: Artforum, November 1974, Vol.13, No.3, S. 3-4 (1974) is one work that has been brought to mind repeatedly when exploring feminisms’ relationship with humour, and triggered one of the key works for the final presentation of this research. The image functions as a centrefold rather than an advertisement, but the restrictions of Artforum at the time meant the only way Benglis could insert her image in the magazine was to purchase advertising through her gallery, Paula Cooper (Benglis and Kim 2009, 172). The work was conceived as a response to the “macho tradition” of exhibition invitations at that time, “showing a photograph of the artist—usually featuring a cigar, cowboy boots, a truck, or a dog—rather than his work” (Lippard in Wark 2006, 173). It was one of four images that were produced in parody of this tradition—specifically an exhibition advertisement that was placed in Artforum for Robert Morris’s exhibition in April of the same year (Pincus-Witten in Gautherot et. al 2009, 53). As described by Jayne Wark (2006, 174), the “scandalous…full-page colour advertisement” depicted the 42 Chapter 2: Contextual Review artist, “naked and slicked up like a bodybuilder, [in which] Benglis assumes an aggressive, hand-on-hip pose, sporting nothing by sunglasses and a gigantic latex dildo.” The work created a great disturbance, a response that was unlike any received by the male artists Benglis was responding to. As Lucy Lippard noted, “The uproar of this last image created proved conclusively that there are still things women may not do” (Lippard 1976, 76). Some likened the image to pornography (Meyer in Gautherot et. al 2009, 63), rather than engaging with the critical complexity of the work as “an ironic self-parody of sexuality, and not the exteriorization of a root eroticism” (Pincus-Witten in Gautherot et. al 2009, 53). Fed up with the “pin-up and the macho,” Benglis assumes both positions and neither (Benglis and Kim 2009, 171). In discussing the strong response to the photograph, Benglis stated: I knew it was going to be like this because of the tension and situation within the art world and within the world itself with regards to the Feminist Movement but also because of the situation in media and politics. Self recognition was very strong at the time. That’s why I did the piece. And I knew it was a matter of timing […] It was important for me to present the sexuality of both a man and a woman together symbolically […] I [was] presenting myself as an object of humanism, so that the sexes would be considered equal (Benglis and Kim 2009, 171). While many critics, as can be seen in Meyer’s abovementioned critique, misunderstood and misrepresented the image, failing to acknowledge its role in the dialogue of gendered inequity at the time, feminist artists: Chapter 2: Contextual Review 43 recognized her work as a defiantly transgressive gesture and the reaction to it as clear evidence of the art world’s gender bias and blindness. It [..] revealed a growing awareness among feminists of how the Modernist myths of aesthetic neutrality, autonomy, and disinterested judgement of “quality,” which [..] were used as convenient devices to downgrade the work of women artists and to justify their exclusion from professional recognition (Wark 2006, 173-174). This work is important for a number of reasons, many of which have been discussed at great length by the writers, critics, and artists who have publicly responded to it13. For me however, what is most fascinating is the fact that many fail to discuss the humour inherent to the work, as if we still cannot dare to connect women, let alone feminists, with humour. Like EXPORT’s Genital Panic, Benglis’ ad is strongly critical of patriarchal structures; it is aggressive, and also incredibly funny! I can place myself in Benglis’ position and imagine what it is that she is thinking/saying and join her in mocking the masculinisation of the art world. This melding of humorous parody with fiery critique has become a key point of reference for my own research position as this project evolved. LOVE AND NARRATIVE Love and narrative have emerged as key themes in the development of this project’s creative outputs. The three key artists I look to when exploring my connection to love and narrative are Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Sophie Calle. 13 A selection of these can be found in the catalogue that accompanied her travelling retrospective, Lynda Benglis. 44 Chapter 2: Contextual Review Love The subject of love has become increasingly important over the course of this project. It has been used as a key conceptual material in my critique of the roles of subjectivity and inequality in art, but it has taken some time to understand why this particular subject has become central to the project. This can be linked to the barriers that exist in both the art world and society more broadly, and the bias I have observed when it comes to men or women communicating ideas about love. bell hooks has provided me with important assistance in my understanding of love as a potential critical strategy. She notes: in popular culture love is always the stuff of fantasy. Maybe this is why men have done most of the theorizing about love. Fantasy has primarily been their domain, both in the sphere of cultural production and in everyday life. Male fantasy is seen as something that can create reality, whereas female fantasy is regarded as pure escape (hooks 2001, xxiii). It is this idea of utilising fantasy in order to create reality and vice versa that resonates as a contextual tool for my creative outputs. I am keen to understand why, when so much of our lives revolve around love (searching for it, finding it, losing it etc.), love is still viewed as a point of weakness in women and in women’s art practices. With so much self-worth invested in notions of love, and more and more attention being paid to “movements for social justice” employing a “love ethic”, it seems implausible that as a society we still struggle to “embrace the idea of love as a transformative force” (hooks 2001, xvii-xix). Chapter 2: Contextual Review 45 Tracey Emin While Emin is not an explicit influence on this project per se, the legacy of her work in regards to subjectivity, and particularly her use of relationships and love as a key material for the work provide valuable contextual support for my creative works; her entire practice revolves around notions of love, being loved and loving (Clearwater 2013, 196). As Bonnie Clearwater (2013, 196) states, Emin “is certain love exists somewhere in the ether, but she has made it her life’s quest to discover whether love can be transformed into something real and whether it can be experienced in art” (Clearwater 2013, 196). In doing so, Emin has placed her life on the record, through interviews, statements, writings and as source material for her artwork. She has made her life her work and vice versa, and no topic is too sensitive, it seems. Neal Brown writes that Emin is on a quest for truth and authenticity (Brown 2006, 10-11); I respect, admire and identify with this pursuit. However, given the way Emin amplifies all elements of her personal life for her artwork and for her engagement with the public, her artistic persona becomes indistinguishable from her authentic self. I am fascinated by the relationship between what is said and meant in her work, and I observe these ambiguities in my own. While for much of the 1990s and 2000s Emin’s work was simultaneously heralded and criticised for its overly confessional and diaristic content, her work has become slightly more ambiguous over time (Clearwater 2013, 198). It is in this ambiguous declaration of subjectivity, and the slippages that exist between the real and the constructed that I connect with in Emin’s practice and works. 46 Chapter 2: Contextual Review Figure 2.9 Tracey Emin Just Love Me 1998 http://www.conceptualfinearts.com/cfa/2014/01/16/from-lucio-fontana-to-nina-canell-a-briefphotographic-history-of-neon-light-in-art/attachment/348011/ I am particularly drawn to her large body of text-based works, particularly the neon works such as Just Love Me (1998) and Move Me (2013), as they embrace the subjective, yet are ambiguous and open, with a sensibility that I am looking for in my own work. They invite the viewer to bring their own story to the work. They prompt us to question, are these works speaking to us, the viewer, or to someone else such as a lover, an unrequited love, a long distance friend. Or perhaps it is the viewer speaking these words as they engage with the words in their mind. Does the viewer then become the author? It is these spaces of ambiguity and potential for an infinite number of exchanges and narratives, prompted by a mere few words, that provides a great sense of excitement for me as both a viewer and a maker. Chapter 2: Contextual Review 47 Figure 2.10 Tracey Emin Move Me 2013 http://www.lehmannmaupin.com/artists/tracey-emin/press_release/0/artist_available Felix Gonzalez-Torres Gonzalez-Torres has long been an influence on my approach to thinking and making; I am inspired by and relate to his use of found objects and minimal forms that explore sexuality, love and loss. As Andrew McNamara suggests, Gonzalez-Torres “contaminate[s] the aloof, pure forms of Minimalism with social references” (McNamara 2008). His work is both political and romantic; it is intimately political. The bed works such as Untitled (1991), clock works such as Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991) and spill works such as Untitled (portrait of Ross in L.A) (1991) have each been, at various times over the course of this project, a direct influence and contextual reference point for my research. It is Gonzalez-Torres’ considered amalgamation of the personal and the political, delivered in a simultaneously open yet ambiguous way, that I find useful in the contextualisation of my own work. As McNamara notes, “The enticement of Gonzalez-Torres's art is that his seemingly sparse and fragile works can deploy social, aesthetic and personal resonances in such a contradictory tension” (McNamara 2008). 48 Chapter 2: Contextual Review Within my own work, and in the creative outputs of this project, I explore deeply personal and political themes in through minimal and gestural presentation. I negotiate the boundaries that exist between providing just enough information to allow the viewer a conceptual access point, and the ambiguity that permits multiple narratives to evolve. This has been complicated and challenging. In my desire to present a body of work that combines my personal narrative with a broader political motivation, Gonzalez-Torres provides rich contextual material; I too aim to straddle the line between “social commentary and personal disclosure”, to quote Spector’s phrase regarding Gonzalez-Torres’ work (Spector 1995, 14). In understanding my attraction to this body of work as well as the desire that I have for a similar melding of personal and political in my own work, bell hooks’ discussion of GonzalezTorres’ work is useful. She asserts that: Once we embrace his vision of the collapse of public and private, the convergence of the individual and the collective, we open ourselves to the possibility of communion and community. The beauty of that union is celebrated in Gonzalez-Torres’s work. Yes as the signs, symbols, and datelines tell us, that union will not come without struggle and sacrifice, without active resistance again those forces of domination that seek to shut down our agency, our will to be self-actualized (hooks 1995, 53). It is this understanding that art can communicate both the personal and political in a way that can open it up to the viewer/s to develop a sense of community that resonates with me. Chapter 2: Contextual Review 49 Figure 2.11 Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled 1991 http://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2012/04/04/printout-felix-gonzalez-torres Gonzalez-Torres’ Untitled (1991) consists of a series of 24 billboards that were displayed throughout New York in 1992. A black and white image depicting an empty, unmade double bed that contains the imprint of two bodies in the sheet and pillows, this work epitomises the artist’s desire to couple the personal and the political in a way that allows the work to be accessible to all. The bed, an intimate object that has been placed in the public domain, makes reference to the loss of his life companion to those who are aware of his history; to those who are not however, the work’s meaning can be broad and complex (Spector 1995, 25). As hooks so eloquently notes: There are many ways to “read” the image of the empty bed. Those who come to it with autobiographical details from Gonzalez-Torres’s life can see projected here the loss of his lover, the impact of AIDS, the power and pleasure of homosexual/homoerotic love and loss, the anguish of grief. Yet for the masses of viewers who saw this work without knowing the intimate details, this black and white image of an empty bed is a shadowy place to be entered not simply through empathy with the artist 50 Chapter 2: Contextual Review but by way of our own relationship to loss, to absence, to leave-taking, to remembered grief. Inviting audiences to remember moments of closeness and separation, this image is a passage linking the particular losses, unnamed sorrows, undocumented deaths can find expression as we gaze upon this bed where living bodies might lie together, leave their mark (hooks 1995, 50-51). In a time when homophobia was rife in the United States (and the world more broadly), this work delivers a candid representation of love and the loss of the artist’s life partner in a way that is not only gentle and touching, but which is also open and enables the construction of multiple narratives (Reed 2011). Figure 2.12 Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Perfect Lovers) 1991 http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=81074 Untitled (Perfect Lovers) (1991) is one of a series of clock works that GonzalezTorres produced. Gonzalez-Torres often recontextualised found objects in his work, employing them to act as ambiguous metaphors for politics, relationships and love. According to Spector, Gonzalez-Torres maintained that, while the clock work could be read in terms of his biography, he felt that, “to adamantly stress the homoerotic Chapter 2: Contextual Review 51 element in the work would mean ‘falling into a trap set by the Right,’ and [he] was conscious to resist the role of marginalised rebel as was often developed for ‘othered’ artists” (Spector 1995). As Gonzalez-Torres explains, “two clocks side by side are much more threatening to the powers that be than an image of two guys sucking each other’s dicks, because they cannot use me as a rallying point in their battle to erase meaning” (Spector 1995, 73). The two clocks speak of two beings situated side-byside, ticking as one, perhaps counting the time they have together, or counting down the time that they have left together. The narratives contained in this work are numerous; this is the success of the work. Figure 2.13 Felix Gonzalez-Torres Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A) 1991 http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/hide_seek/gonzalez_torres.php The subtlety of metaphor is a key strength of Gonzalez-Torres’ work. As Spector states, “the body is everywhere present in Gonzalez-Torres’s work, yet it is rarely visible as such…for the most part, the corporeal is only implied” (Spector 1995, 140). Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A) (1991) is one of many spilled candy works that were produced by Gonzalez-Torres and consists of 175 pounds of candy piled in 52 Chapter 2: Contextual Review the corner of a room. The work is both erotic and tragic. With the title providing contextual information, a viewer with biographical information about GonzalezTorres can imagine that the artist is giving us a sculptural representation of “Ross”, Gonzalez-Torres’s life partner who passed away from AIDS in the same year. Of this work, Gonzalez-Torres stated: It’s a metaphor. I’m not pretending it to be anything other than this—I’m not splashing lead on the floor. I’m giving you this sugary thing; you put it in your mouth and you suck on someone else’s body. And in this way, my work becomes part of so many other people’s bodies. It’s very hot. For just a few seconds, I have put something sweet in someone’s mouth and that is very sexy (in Spector 1995, 149-150)14. And yet, given knowledge of the artist suffered that same year, what at first could appear to be bright, fun, and slightly erotic, quickly evolves into a connection to grief and sadness. hooks (1995, 53) suggests, “in his grappling with subversive beauty, with an aesthetics of loss, Gonzalez-Torres insists that our lives be that space where beauty is made manifest, where the power of human connection and interaction creates that loveliness that ‘will never pass into nothingness.’” In this sense, perhaps, Gonzalez-Torres is not only connecting us, as viewers, with the work, but also connecting with his lost love. Fictive Narratives Narrative has also been key element of this project, in the writing of this document and in the development of the creative works. Both this document and creative works 14 This quote from Gonzalez-Torres particularly appeals to me because when he states that he is “not splashing lead on the floor” he is referring directly to Richard Serra’s “Splash Pieces”, which were executed between 1968-1970. While I work to critique this history through a strategy of reverence and faux-llaboration, Gonzalez-Torres openly shunned this masculine form of art. Chapter 2: Contextual Review 53 show the progression of ideas and approaches through the lens of time. Paul Ricoeur argues, “the world unfolded by every narrative work is always a temporal world” (Ricoeur 1984, 3). Time and narrative have become increasingly important elements of this project over its duration. As David Pellauer (1997, xiv) observes, for Ricoeur, “narrative is the way we finally make sense of the temporality of our experience” and this has been the case for this project. Temporality has become increasingly important as it has allowed for the development of the research, both conceptually and materially; it tells of the developing relationship between my understanding of a gendered response to the modernist canon, and allows the artworks to operate in conversation with each other, as they are intended. Sophie Calle I have long admired Calle’s work and practice as a whole, but more recently she has become a contextual support for this project because of the blending of personal narratives that unfold in her work, particular those of love and romance, reality and fiction. The crossovers between life and art have always played a vital role in Calle’s practice, even before she “became” 15 an artist (McFadden 2014, 146). While the work is often portrayed as representing her life in autobiographical form, her accounts of the works and her biography present occasional discrepancies, prompting a questioning of the place of truth, and therefore of storytelling, in her body of work as a whole (McFadden 2014, 159). As Cybelle McFadden notes, “Calle does not offer authenticity to her spectators but absolute authority. Her art is presented 15 Calle’s journey to becoming an artist is a simple, yet interesting one. For more information see McFadden, Cybelle H. 2014. Gendered Frames, Embodied Cameras : Varda, Akerman, Cabrera, Calle, and Maïwenn. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press: Maryland. 54 Chapter 2: Contextual Review through the filter of her life, but the representational bracketing of these experiences makes them first and foremost art” (McFadden 2014, 162). Similarly to that of Emin, Calle’s public persona is as much a part of the works as the creative outputs are. It is the ambiguous space between reality and fiction that I find alluring in her work. The power of this ambiguity prompts me to question why it is that viewers appear to need the work to be real, to be ‘authentic’ in order for it to be valued. The questionable veracity of the relationships that appear in Calle’s works have assisted me to give my own work the permission to appear as one thing, while representing another. Calle’s use of her personal life [whether real or constructed] as a primary material for her work has led me to question, explore and insert a fashioning of both real and imagined realities within my own work rather than consistently working with purely autobiographical content. Figure 2.14 Sophie Calle The Fake Wedding / Le Faux Mariage 1992 https://www.perrotin.com/Sophie_Calle-works-oeuvres-19746-1.html Stories of romance, love and loss are frequent in Calle’s body of work. For example, she has documented a fake and real wedding, her subsequent divorce, and the Chapter 2: Contextual Review 55 emotional toll of the end of a relationship. The Fake Wedding (1992) is a photographic and text work that depicts the artist in a wedding dress with a fake groom and wedding party on the steps of a church in the Parisian suburbs, and also tells the story of how this event came to be (the staging of the setting was followed by a fake civil ceremony by a real celebrant and a reception). The photograph “is not a wedding photograph but a photograph of Calle as a woman getting married: not the document of a real event but an elaborate performance” (Jordan 2013, 250). As McFadden states: This blending of the fake and the real highlights similar processes involved in the coexistence of fact and fiction in Calle’s work: she needs the ambiguity to create an element of truth. The most telling line of her text is the following one: “I crowned the truest story of my life with a fake marriage”…Her claim that a fabricated event is the most true or authentic moment for her indicates the power of narrative to reveal truth (McFadden 2014, 166). I connect with Calle’s explicit approach to storytelling through the lens and voice of a fictional woman and the various tropes of heterosexual romance that are repeated throughout Calle’s body of work. The Fake Wedding challenges the societal constructs that still require women to feel that they have not achieved in life unless they are married. In her discussion of the work, Shirley Jordan notes, “the residual power of traditional love stories is evoked in Calle by the theatrical prop of the wedding dress, which is a recurrent feature of her work” (Jordan 2013, 251). The narrative of the wedding dress and the wedding allow Calle to claim the space of ‘happily ever after.’ 56 Chapter 2: Contextual Review Minimalist Art set the scene for my initial engagement with the [male] modernist canon, and the works of numerous women who work in a way that pays homage to and/or critiques this legacy provided a strong contextual framework for some of the works I produced early in this project. Feminist Art has provided a rich field of practice that I have been able to engage with in order to contextualise my ideas and approaches as well as to develop my own strategy for a feminist critique. Artists such as VALIE EXPORT and Lynda Benglis changed the way I viewed humour in art, creating and understanding of how humour can be used to express a strong critique of gender bias in a way that is incredibly funny. The works and practices of Emin, Gonzalez-Torres and Calle have each provided me with a better understanding of how love and fictive narrative can operate in the development of a political voice. They have provided the space for me to produce work that explicitly engages with the modernist canon from my position as a young, female artist. They give context for my use of love and romantic symbols as a metaphor for a position with regard to the artistic canon that is both reverent and critical. By embracing fictive narratives, and faux-llaborative relationships I have been able to embrace love and storytelling as a strategy for uniting the personal with the political. By inviting these intimate and vulnerable exchanges into my work, I have developed a way to communicate my subjective voice as a method for critique. Chapter 2: Contextual Review 57 Chapter 3: Research Design This chapter outlines the method by which this research was undertaken in order to unpack my creative and critical relationships with both feminisms and contemporary art practice. I will outline the particular methodology of practice-based research developed through re-examining and extending on modes of reflexive practice and strategies of humour in art. I will also discuss how particular feminist methodologies, have informed making in the studio, as well as defined the conceptual field of the research. PRACTICE AS RESEARCH Practice-based research – The tentative gesture The primary methodology of my project has been practice-based research. I research through making, and in the case of my PhD, the product of that making forms 70% of my final research outcome. My research outputs inform the theoretical research, and the theoretical research, in turn, informs the making. This dialogue between different research modes is crucial to the project’s outcomes because the creative works I make present both idea and material on an equal footing, rejecting the hierarchies of both conceptual and formalist art histories. The work embraces the site of exploratory and speculative movements between those approaches to making, presenting instead a ‘tentative gesture’. My creative process takes the form of varying methods and is informed by texts, situations, experiences, materials, and memories. I like the interplay of stuff, both material and conceptual: shapes, materials, surfaces, scale, colours, sudden and Chapter 3: Research Design 59 fortuitous revelations, ambiguity, contradiction, and emotion-invoking objects. I find this stuff intriguing, confounding and appealing. I personalise these elements, and they become almost human to me. In a sort of animistic way, these objects emit a certain energy that I connect with. I form relationships with them; at times I consider these relationships to equate to romantic involvements. In metaphorical terms, we talk, date, get to know each other, fall in love, have arguments, break up, and get back together. In formal terms, these moments of passion and elation, anticipation, uncertainty and risk, are realised through the material processes as the creative works come together through the toing and froing of the formal and conceptual relationships that develop and form the final output in a tentative way. The tentative gesture can be understood as a condition of the creative process and the physical outcomes; it describes both the open ended possibilities and its provisional ‘completeness’. As a unique methodological approach to making art it takes the metaphorical motif of romantic love to describe the complicated, complex, and often paradoxical negotiations that I undertake as a female artist engaging with the various heteronormative, patriarchal structures of art. The first instance where I applied this tentative approach to making art was in the work 11:59 (2010). 11:59, produced by positioning masking tape in response to the light that filled the gallery space at 11:59am, was a response to the feedback I received for an earlier exhibition, Patronise Me (2009). Patronise Me explored the potential for multiple aesthetic voices within the gallery. Feeling overwhelmed by the prospect of my first solo exhibition, I could not select one work from the many ideas I had developed. My solution was to produce them all, as miniature installations. I built nine scale models of the gallery space and produced a different 60 Chapter 3: Research Design installation for each model. That exhibition seemed ‘successful’ in the sense that viewers responded in a positive manner to the work; those who saw the work were seduced by the structures and the materials, as I had been. However, this apparent success was an immediate red flag for me, I realised at that particular moment that I wanted to communicate more than a fetishistic love of materials and my romance with the history of Minimal Art. I also wanted the work to prompt the viewer to consider the gallery as a site, the conceptual and critical implications of this venue, and the various assumptions that we bring to it as both makers and viewers. 11:59 aimed to do this by engaging with the gallery in a less materially and/or formally seductive way. Using but a few pieces of ripped masking tape, I drew attention to the light and shadow that created various ‘paintings’ on the walls and floors of the space in order to suggest both a formally abstract and conceptual engagement with the gallery. Reflexivity As an extension of the practice-based research approach being developed through the tentative gesture, the idea of reflexivity as laid out below became an equally vital strategy for negotiating the central aims of the research project. Finlay and Gough (2003, 1) define reflexivity as “a challenge to conventional ideals […] which favour professional distance and objectivity over engagement and subjectivity” (Finlay and Gough 2003, 1). A broad set of approaches, reflexivity has been practiced in various forms, but the approach most approximating my own is “ironic deconstruction” (Finlay 2003, 3-4). Linda Finlay suggests that reflexivity as ironic deconstruction is a common approach for those engaging with social critique, and that this form of reflexive practice “arises out of a postmodern, post-structuralist paradigm” (Finlay Chapter 3: Research Design 61 2003, 14). She notes that researchers using a reflexive approach are able to “challenge and unravel the rhetoric of being a ‘voice of authority’ enabling, instead, multiple voices to be heard” (Finlay 2003, 14). Embracing Finlay’s definition of reflexive practice allowed me to acknowledge my position as an artist/ researcher, and enable me to define who I am, and why I choose to include certain elements and/or information and eliminate others (Finlay 2003, 16). In her discussion of feminist scholarship that utilises reflexivity, Wanda Pillow asserts that as a practice it is “not only about investigating the power embedded in one’s research but is also about doing research differently” (Pillow 2003, 178). My own subjectivity and responses to what Finlay refers to as the “rhetoric” and patriarchal “voice of authority” have been central to the development of this project’s methodology (Finlay 2003, 16). Reflexive practices, particularly the idea of ‘uncomfortable reflexivity’ as outlined below has impacted significantly on both the voice I have chosen to use in this exegetical document, which moves in and out of a personal, conversational tone, the way I make my artwork, and engages with the canons of modernist art. How these and the other research strategies below inform the operations and outcomes of tentative practices will be reviewed again at the conclusion of this chapter. Collaboration My creative outputs are based in my solo visual art practice and the outcomes of my studio-based activity, but importantly also include independently curated projects, various collaborative art projects and a long-term involvement in Brisbane-based artist run initiatives. These activities also resonate with the conditions and operations of the tentative gesture because they involve negotiating the dialogues, actions, and 62 Chapter 3: Research Design the outcomes of the social, cultural, and political realities of collaborative work: they bring another level of provisionality to the personal and inter-subjective realities of making and exhibiting art. My involvement with fellow artists Antoinette J. Citizen, Brooke Ferguson and Caitlin Franzmann, as well as my experience of being a founding co-director of the artist run initiatives, No Frills*16 (2008-2010) and LEVEL17 (2010 – current) has afforded me the opportunity to work with some amazing women in this time. It has not only been an enriching experience for me professionally [I would not have been able to realise many of these projects on my own] but it has been personally enriching as well. Through these conversations with my fellow practitioners, I explored the significance of collaborative processes, which then generated practice, and the practice/s in turn generated new conversations; as Jill Mattuck Tarule notes, “dialogue is making knowledge in conversation” (Mattuck Tarule 1996, 280). This dialogical mode of enquiry and discovery is fundamental to the operations and ambitions of the tentative gesture because it deconstructs the idea of academic disciplinary authority, predicated as it is on the patriarchal model of success that pervades both the academy and the art world. As Mattuck Tarule’s points out, “the academy’s requirements for becoming an expert by achieving disciplinary author(ity) reward the isolated, lone individual and eliminate those who understand knowledge as a nonfoundational construction mediated by and constructed by dialogue” (Mattuck Tarule 1996, 295). 16 With Antoinette J. Citizen, Catherine Sagin and Kate Woodcroft Co-founded by Rachael Haynes and Alice Lang, and joined by Anita Holtsclaw, Caitlin Franzmann and Courtney Pedersen in 2013 17 Chapter 3: Research Design 63 The creation of, and participation in these intellectually and practically connected relationships has been pivotal in the development of this project time and time again. This knowledge making, combined with the development and longevity of the camaraderie that I have witnessed and experienced in these collectives, has confirmed for me that a feminist methodology that embraces collaborative practice as a political strategy is a worthy and important one indeed. It also affirms for me that the exploratory and speculative operations of the tentative gesture can extend beyond the personal space of my making and operate across collaborative relationships in very empowering ways. The collaborative approach to making is central to many feminist strategies as it functions in opposition to the notion of a sole author and/or authority. By utilising my method of the tentative gesture in collaborative situations I/we have been able to share in the messiness and uncertainty of researching the crossovers between art, gender and feminist practice. Collaboration has been a key approach of feminisms since its inception, with many women finding strength in numbers. Kathryn Ward and Linda Grant (1991, 249) discuss collaboration as an approach to research and observe that “research conducted by women is characterised by a communal approach, emphasising collaboration with other scholars and sometimes with research subjects [including] women and feminist scholars in other disciplines and persons outside the academy”. Ward and Grant posit collaboration as a valuable way to acquire feedback, and even identify it as a survival strategy in the development of community (Ward and Grant 1991). Working closely with other artists and women has facilitated my understanding of 64 Chapter 3: Research Design the productive possibilities of collaborative research. Because of this I have also developed a process of making so that even when working alone, I can be ‘collaborating’ with others. I have coined the term to describe these fictional collaborations, ‘faux-llaboration’. In my various faux-llaborative processes I consider responses to concepts, materials and sites, both physically and metaphorically, as fictional collaborative relationships. I also engage both directly and indirectly with various legacies of modernist art and its artists, creating works in direct dialogue as a way to critique the structures of art – these faux-llaborations will be discussed in more detail later in this document. Humour as a method of ironic deconstruction I have found humour to be a valuable tool for investigating the contradictory relationships I have with art as a feminist situated within a male dominated art world18. I am serious about making art; it is at the core of who I am and I am emotionally and intellectually attached to it. At times however, I am struck by the absurdity of this connection; as a woman I sometimes feel like I am wading through the quicksand of this boys’ club. While it would be wonderful if the work of women over the last century had achieved the goal of equal opportunities, unfortunately this is not the case19. Becoming more acutely aware of this situation, particularly in the institutional conventions and practices of the art world, I also realised that often my responses to this in the work I was making reflected both a kind of ironic attachment 18 David Trend (2002, 87) defines the art world as “both a constellation of diverse groups (viewers, curators, critics, patrons, gallerists, publicists, administrators, government bureaucrats) and the labyrinthine relationships among them. At the putative center of this universe stand artists, the mythically valorised and materially pauperized assembly-line producers in the aesthetic economy…” 19 As an example, the activist blog CoUNTtess collected statistics from the Venice Biennale in 2013, the longest running event of its kind, showing that in the curated exhibition of that year, 69% of artists were men, 24% were women and 7% were collaborations, and of the solo country pavilions in the same year, 74% were men and 26% were women. (Countess 2013) Chapter 3: Research Design 65 and detachment to the art world: it was both complicit with and critical of it. In another serendipitous encounter over the course of the research, via Elizabeth Grosz, I encountered Derrida’s notion of deconstruction, and as philosophically difficult as it is, the idea of the ‘double affirmation’ also seemed to resonate with the paradoxical space I found myself in as a female artist. In 1967 Derrida published three texts, Speech and Phenomena, Writing and Difference and Of Grammatology, each have formed the approach to critique that is known as deconstruction. Deconstruction encompasses a broad set of complex ideas that various writers, including Derrida, claim cannot be easily defined, with plural definitions and usages. Peggy Kamuf outlines deconstruction as “neither a field nor a method. As a mode of study, a practice, and a theoretical endeavour, its object has no certain or determined limits” (Kamuf 2008, 1). Saul Newman describes deconstruction as a “strategy of questioning” and a “critique of the authoritarian structures” (Newman 2001, 2), however, Elizabeth Grosz argues that it is not simply a matter of questioning or critique (Grosz 2010, 132). She states that: Derridean deconstruction is double affirmation, rather then simply negative and critical; its double affirmation consists in the affirmation in the very systems we may wish to challenge—logocentrism, phallocentrism, Eurocentrism; that is, an affirmation of our necessary complicity in the systems we may like to separate from ourselves (Grosz 2010, 132). While I am not using Derrida explicitly in this research, I have found this definition useful for understanding how I approach, to use the words of Pugliese “the complex network of differences” (Pugliese 2010, 142) that make up my own research. As 66 Chapter 3: Research Design Grosz (1995, 116) argues, “deconstruction provides a way of rethinking common conceptions of politics and struggle, power and resistance by insisting that no system, method, or discourse can be as all-encompassing, singular, and monolithic as it represents itself.” I embrace the ambivalent position that comes from critiquing structures of power from within, where there is a shift from one viewpoint to the next. In order to further the cause of feminism this project has openly embraced aspects of patriarchal structures within the art world, but with a feminist methodological approach. By doing so, rather than trying to ignore, or work from outside of these structures I have embraced Grosz’s double affirmation, as “without both moments in this affirmative investment […] feminism remains in danger of repeating and being unable to recognize the very implications it believes it has repudiated” (Grosz 1995, 116-117). Derrida used deconstruction as a tool to analyse and reveal the inconsistencies or paradoxes in philosophical and literary texts, but as he remarked, it can be transformed into an approach to the realm of visual art. He argued that the word “text” “goes beyond the purely discursive”, and that works of art “cannot help but be caught within a network of differences and references that give them a textual structure” (Derrida in Martinengo 2012, 7). In my case this ‘textual structure’ is the constellation of art histories, approaches to art making, feminisms, and material forms that make up the research. Like the idea of uncomfortable reflexivity discussed later in the chapter, this thing I inhabit is ‘messy’, it is inherently contradictory, ambiguous, and full of inconsistences. So I became much more consciously aware of the ironies that arise from this complex ‘network of differences’, and this became another key strategy of the methodology. In combining various types of humour, and Chapter 3: Research Design 67 irony in particular, with this idea of deconstruction in my work, I have found this approach to challenging the patriarchal structures of cultural and social life to be compelling and vital to my practice as a feminist and an artist. As with humour and feminisms, there has been surprisingly little written about the relationship between humour and modern art, with only a few studies available, despite the regular deployment of humour in the art of the early 1900s, post World War I and the Dadaist art movement (Munder 2005, 212). In Art and Laughter, Sheri Klein lists the primary types of humour most commonly found in art as “satire, parody, pun, paradox, irony and dark humour” (Klein 2007, 13). She asserts that artists employ humour as a strategy in order to, “enlighten, elevate and educate” (Klein 2007, 13). The two types of humour that I primarily use as strategies for deconstructive critique are irony and puns or word play. These strategies allow me to play with the authority and arbitrary nature of language in my work. Klein describes irony as “a leading form of humour [...] enabled by using words or a combination of words and images to express something completely different from the literal meaning of the word or object” (Klein 2007, 19). She contends that, “the purpose of irony in art is to awaken our capacity to see subtle contradictions in images and within language so that we may ‘read between the lines,’ and not take everything at face value” (Klein 2007, 19). A visual pun is then defined as, “an image with two or more concurrent meanings resulting in the understanding of images on more than one level” (Klein 2007, 18). Klein proposes that, “puns in art, while they may be entertaining, create new associations and meanings through word play, and the relationships between 68 Chapter 3: Research Design text and images” (Klein 2007, 18). This play of word and image, as both a playful and potentially destabilising combination, is key to the method of critique in this project, the tentative gesture. FEMINIST APPROACHES TO MAKING It took the best part of the first two years of this project to reconcile my feminist ideology with my creative outputs. Even now, I sometimes struggle with the relationship between these two personas: my feminist self and my artist self. However, for all of the complications that will be explored in more detail throughout this section, as a researcher and a practitioner I am consistently viewing the world, and more specifically my art practice, through a feminist lens. Understanding Feminisms Feminisms cannot be “easily defined or pinned down” (Jones 2010, 2). Feminisms officially arose out of the suffragette movements of the late nineteenth century, and were regenerated in the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In discussing key shifts in feminism[s] over time, Amelia Jones explains: In its most recent forms, reflecting the shift towards increasingly globalized cultural, political, economic, and social relations in the past fifteen years, feminism insists on broadening models of analysing the role of gender in cultural experience to accommodate the coextensivity of gender and other modes of subjectivity—including aspects of sexual orientation, racial, ethnic, and faith-based identifications, nationality, class, and so on (Jones 2010, 1-2). Chapter 3: Research Design 69 The journey toward understanding how feminisms, as broad and at times contradictory politics, are relevant to me as an early career researcher and artist has been a steep and winding road. The first stage of this project focused on understanding feminisms’ relevance to contemporary society, art and research. I asked numerous questions such as: “what is the history of feminist art practice?”, “how are feminisms relevant to artists today?” and “how can we as a group of women artists learn to adopt and embrace feminist strategies with our practices?” As previously noted, in early 2009 I found that many people, both men and women, were resistant to the term ‘feminism’, with very few individuals understanding its place in contemporary cultural, social or political dialogue. I believed at this time that there needed to be a new way to discuss feminisms, which included finding a new way to define the concept of equality in the contemporary context. The principles of “New Feminism” were my perceived solution at this time. This term stemmed from an essay written by curator Rosa Martinez in 2002, New Feminism (First Manifesto)20. Martinez (in Nochlin 2005) asks, “If we write the word ‘new’ before the word ‘feminism’, would some people still be suspicious or even afraid?” She then answers her own question by stating: They should not! New Feminism is an inclusive movement that gathers a series of radical but flexible strategies to reinvent the emotional, sexual, economical and geopolitical distribution of power.... New Feminism is aware of the strong role of women in the economic development of their societies and asks for a better distribution of the benefits.... New feminism puts into question the backlash of the nineties that still pretends 20 This document is out of print and impossible to acquire, so I am forced to reference a secondary source. 70 Chapter 3: Research Design that equality between men and women has already been achieved (Martinez in Nochlin 2005). After my enthusiastic start to an engagement with this definition however, I realised that a pro-life, Christian movement had adopted this term for their cause, promoting traditional gender roles in the home, anti-abortion and other such anti-feminist attributes (Martin 2013), rendering it difficult [to say the least] for me to adopt the label New Feminism for my research purposes. Exploring this idea of adopting a new term for feminism provided me with an insight into writers such as Natasha Walter21, bell hooks22, and Jo Reger23, who were adopting the terms “new feminism” and “contemporary feminism” when discussing feminisms for the contemporary world. Over time, I became increasingly frustrated by the apparent need to sever ties to previous feminist eras and movements. We needed to learn the lessons of feminisms/feminists! Research into varied approaches to contemporary feminist processes led me to understand that severing ties would be playing into the hands of those who were misguided about the definition and the role that feminisms and feminists had played in our history, or fearful of the implications of its success. As a consequence, in 2011, I relinquished the desire to find a new way to define and communicate feminisms in the twenty-first century, instead focusing on better understanding feminisms as strategies for research and living. Critique and Reverence There are a multitude of feminist approaches to research, but I most clearly identify 21 The New Feminism (1999) Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) 23 Everywhere and Nowhere: Contemporary Feminism in the United States (2012) 22 Chapter 3: Research Design 71 with and appropriate methods of research that relate to revision, collaboration and subjectivity. Leslie Bloom discusses feminist methodology as being an approach to research that “promises a more interpersonal and reciprocal relationship between researchers and those whose lives are the focus of the research,” adding that it “seeks to break down barriers that exist among women as well as the barriers that exist between the researcher and the researched” (Bloom 1998, 1). This approach relates to the creative outputs of this project as well as the interwoven theoretical research; since the commencement of my studies in visual art, I have desired an engagement with both the history of art and artists. This desire to connect and form relationships and dialogues with the site of art takes place in the creative works through a revision and re-contextualisation of the legacy of modernism, primarily focusing on Minimalist and Postminimalist practices. While I often look to the past for my reference points, I do so with the intention of opening up a dialogue with it from a feminist perspective and presenting a new viewpoint or creative outcome from that. As Judith Barry and Sandy Flitterman-Lewis assert, “a more theoretically informed art can contribute to enduring changes by addressing itself to structural and deep-seated causes of women’s oppression rather than to its effects” (Barry and Flitterman-Lewis 2010, 66). By embracing a pluralistic range of historical and theoretical constructs, and recontextualising them through the creative practice, this project unpacks those constructions and narratives. My approach to practice often involves a direct response to the past in an attempt to understand today; it is a revisionist strategy. Nicholas Davey states that practices engaging directly with history are not “destined to remain the same. The inheritance 72 Chapter 3: Research Design of a tradition or a work practice is not definitive, closed and/or resolved. To the contrary, they retain tensions, contradictions and unrealised futures” (Davey 2006, 21). Griselda Pollock notes that: Feminist thought has never meant limiting women to the study of women’s issues. Thus feminist work in and on art history is not just about the restitution of women artists to official histories […] Feminist thought confronts the entire field of the histories of artistic and cultural practices with questions about difference (Pollock 1988, xxi). Revision, critique and re-contextualisation of difference in art are key feminist strategies relevant to the project. Feminist revision of art history does not only identify key women artists who have been overlooked, it is also an effort to expand “the entire field of intellectual endeavour to acknowledge the significance of sexual and other differences amidst the play of social, economic, ideological, semiotic and psychological factors one might consider” (Pollock 1988, xxi). Theory has been a terrain that I have needed to negotiate as an early career feminist researcher. I commenced this project wary, or dubious of theory24 with a “capital T” because I understood it to be a masculine construct that alienates my realm of understanding. I discuss Janet Wolff’s description of this sensation (1995, 18) later in this chapter. However, as a result of the practice-led research I have undertaken, I am now in a position to embrace theory as, to use the words of Edward Smith, “a lens through which reality is viewed, or a template that is placed on reality” (Smith 2012, 9). I have engaged with the history of art as a starting point for my making. The 24 Edward Smith (2012, 9) defines theory as, “an optional, coherent system of vocabulary and concepts that can be used to describe and understand some phenomenon in the realm of that theory.” Chapter 3: Research Design 73 crucial step in forming a working relationship with theory has been in crossreferencing with feminist thinking as a means of contextualising the practice. This approach to practice-based research enables a more nuanced understanding of the complexities of the individual and institutional relationships between creative and critical processes, particularly for women artists. As discussed by Nancy Miller, “personal critique is not turning one’s back on theory but ‘turning theory back on itself’” (Miller in Stacey 1997, 64). Miller adds, “the introduction of more personal modes of writing into feminist theorising can disperse the public-private hierarchy that maintains masculine academic professionalism and indeed patriarchal cultural relations more generally” (Miller in Stacey 1997, 64). In this way, I want to creatively and productively communicate and critique the issues that feminist artists and academics continue to face, regardless of the rhetoric about equality. Uncomfortable Reflexivity Extending the idea of reflexive practice, Wanda Pillow suggests the use of the term “uncomfortable reflexivity” as an approach for feminist enquiry. Pillow describes “uncomfortable reflexivity” as “a reflexivity that seeks to know while at the same time situates this knowing as tenuous” (Pillow 2003, 188). The idea of an uncertain and sometimes fragile way of developing new knowledge has informed both the feminist and practice-based research I undertook in this project. Embracing and working through the highs and lows, the awkward conflicts and paradoxes of art and feminism, has allowed for the development of my voice. As Pillow suggests: this is not easy or comfortable work and thus should not be situated as such. The qualitative research arena would benefit from more “messy” 74 Chapter 3: Research Design examples, examples that may not always be successful, examples that do not seek a comfortable, transcendent end-point but leave us in the uncomfortable realities of doing engaged qualitative research. (Pillow 2003, 188) I have found that at each moment of progression in my research there have been more questions arising, rather than answers found. While this has been frustrating and confusing at times, embracing this approach of uncomfortable reflexivity afforded me the position to accept the unknown, and critique the institutional and authoritarian paradigms of art through the methodological approach described throughout the chapter: the tentative gesture. As I described in introducing my approach to practice-led research, the notion of the tentative gesture is at the core of the creative outcomes of this project. It encapsulates my methodology that establishes a pluralistic constellation of conceptual motifs and material forms to interrogate the relationships between making, exhibiting and creating dialogue about feminist perspectives of contemporary art. The works are often ephemeral, existing specifically for a particular time and space. I habitually recreate objects and/or installations in different scenarios in order to explore new relationships between the work and the site, the work and other works (both mine and others), the work and the viewer, and myself and the viewer. I do not aim for a work to ever be ‘finished’, instead I am presenting a proposition of an idea as it exists at a given time. At times the work has said all that it needs to say [that I need to say], in that moment, and at other times there is more to be said. In expressing my distinctive, if sometimes hesitant or qualified, voice, the creative work produced for this project explores my position as an emerging female artist in conversation with Chapter 3: Research Design 75 the male-dominated arena of contemporary arts practice and aims to create a broader dialogue surrounding gendered positions in both art and life. Dialogue and Exchange As discussed earlier in this chapter, a large portion of this project has been developed through various engagements and discussions with my peers, colleagues, students and the public more broadly. I engage in dialogue and exchange with materials, artworks, and artists I’ve never met or spoken to, some of whom have passed away25. The works also engage in their own dialogues, with the space that they are made in and/or for, the spaces they are shown in, with each other and the their audience; dialogue and exchange is at the crux of why I make art. The dialogues and exchanges I have with real and imagined people function without a hierarchical bias in the practice, and these particular dialogues allow me to enter into a direct exchange with the notion of the male artist as hero, with the inequalities of the art world, and with society more broadly. In her discussion of the use of dialogue as a strategy in Feminist Art, Whitney Chadwick discusses the idea of a Bakhtinian model of dialogue, one that includes “polemical dialogue, an active engagement with the precursor’s work and an active response to it” (Chadwick 1998, 131). As Chadwick notes, “the concept of dialogue is more fruitful than that of ‘subversion’ …because I do not believe that artists like [Annette] Messager, Cindy Sherman and others…have sought to ‘destroy,’ ‘ruin,’ or overthrow completely’ (these are the chief dictionary definitions of ‘subvert’) the work of their male predecessors”(Chadwick 1998, 131). I find this reference useful as I align with this 25 76 As discussed in the section on faux-llaboration in Chapter 4 Chapter 3: Research Design desire to discuss, question, and bring awareness to these inequalities that exist rather than “destroy” the works of those I am engaging with through this process. Again this process aligns itself with the paradoxical condition of the tentative gesture as a way to evoke exploratory, speculative, critical and creative potential through works. Narrative Inquiry Narrative inquiry has been a useful framing device for examining the dialogues and exchanges I have experienced through collaborative and faux-llaborative processes. Narrative inquiry began as a research methodology in the academy the 1920s, a time when sociologists were developing an interest in the life histories of people in both America and further afield (Butler-Kisber 2010, 63) and was revived as a tool for research in the 1960s and 1970s during the Women’s Liberation Movement when there was a “reignited interest in personal narratives” (Butler-Kisber 2010, 63). It developed as a strong “method” and “phenomena” in the development and communication of creative works (Pinnegar & Daynes 2007, 5). As Lynn ButlerKisber notes, “narrative is the way humans account for their actions and events around them and shape their everyday experience” (Butler-Kisber 2010, 63). As a complimentary strategy for reflexive research it has been important for the project because as Butler-Kisber suggests, “Narrative inquiry begins in experience as expressed in lived and told stories. The method and the inquiry always have experiential starting points that are informed by and intertwined with theoretical literature that informs either the methodology or an understanding of the experiences with which the inquirer began” (Butler-Kisber 2010, 5). Almost every stage of this project has been directed by my own lived experiences. These viewed through the Chapter 3: Research Design 77 lens of various feminist and art theories has developed my understanding of these experiences and established a coherent structure for the presentation of the research. The creative exploration of the role of narrative, and the subtle integration of it in the research process and outcomes, has proved a useful tool for me in evaluating each stage of the project. By creating a set of narratives that contain something like, to use Pellauer’s words, a “beginning, middle, and end” I have produced “extended forms of discourse marked by at least quasi-causal connections” (Pellauer 1997, xv). It also aligns with my approach of the tentative gesture through its emphasis on being sensitive to spatial and temporal modes of understanding experiential knowledge. This idea of experiential knowledge also connects strongly to the questions I ask in the project concerning my experience as a feminist and artist and the very construction of knowledge within the institutions of art. Feminisms and theory Uncomfortable reflexivity has been a strategy for constructing my feminist visual arts practice in the complicated and (at times) compromised spaces of academic research. My engagement with feminist research inside the academy has been filled with contradiction; at times I have felt fortunate and grateful for the opportunity to focus on research that I am so passionate about; however, there have also been times when I have felt and/or observed the inequality that still exists within the walls of the institution. Feminisms and feminist scholarship have a complicated relationship with the academy; in the beginning women were denied entry, then they were admitted into segregated institutions, and then invited to join co-educational institutions into specific courses only. Sneja Gunew states that at the time of women’s inclusion in 78 Chapter 3: Research Design the academy, “theories about women’s inability to think at basic levels, much less the higher branches of so-called pure knowledge, abounded. Thus one can safely say that the academy was largely operated by men who were in the privileged position of creating meaning in terms of its public discourses” (Gunew 2013, 15). My awareness of patriarchal privilege has stemmed directly from my experiences as a student, an artist, and an academic. The search for knowledge has always been important to me, and understanding how knowledge is constructed has become an important road in this research journey. As Chris Corrin notes, “Since much feminist thinking focuses on the consciousness, of how our experience can be used as a basis for theorising, it asks questions concerning the construction of knowledge” (Corrin 2014, 2). Gunew (2013, 14) defines knowing as, “any kind of meaning production, as the way in which we make sense of the world by learning various sets of conventions”. Gunew differentiates her definition of knowledge from knowledge as it has been defined as “legitimated within certain institutions, notably (but not only) the educational system. Knowledge here becomes authorized learning to which only some have access” (Gunew 2013, 14). And while we may imagine the academy, as a site of knowledge finding and making, is an equal playing field, and that women can, in contemporary society, study in any discipline of their choosing, we are still stuck with patriarchal approaches to the production of, and more importantly, the valuing of knowledge. In other words, what is understood to be relevant and valuable knowledge is still largely prescribed by, and for, men, with respect to the political, economic, social and cultural stakes. Chapter 3: Research Design 79 In my pursuit of knowledge and understanding its production, feminist theory[s] has come to be the primary reference point for discovering who I am as a maker of art, a researcher and a person; feminism has had a holistic impact. I have read about feminisms and subsequently become a more informed, empathetic and open person. Engaging with Feminist theory[s] provided substantial insight into my person, and thus, in the spirit of practice-based research, lead the direction of my research, both creatively and theoretically. It has not been an uncomplicated relationship, however. As previously touched on, engaging with feminist scholarship that has been produced within a system that continues to have its roots firmly planted in a continued masculine approach to the production of knowledge has been complex. It has taken me some time to form a resolute understanding of the relationship between feminist scholarship and the academy, one that aligns with the previously discussed ‘double affirmation’ of deconstruction, the notion that one must embrace both the structure and the methods of critique in order to create change. I found this particularly difficult at the beginning of the project. While on one hand I understood the need to extend the conversation of gendered issues, to broaden the audience and give credence to the feminist plight, and to work within the system that is being critique, on the other, I continued to question the use of the [masculine] academic systems that feminist theory is working against. Janet Wolff discusses this complicated relationship between feminism[s] and the academy, making a case for the importance of feminist theory (Wolff 1995). She states that: The importance, first, of theory in the most general sense, as knowledge—as giving an account of the social world and specifically its structuring around gender. The importance, too, of theory as critique— 80 Chapter 3: Research Design that is, as a more systematic analysis of how gender divisions have been constructed and maintained historically and in the present. And the importance of theory, lastly, when the ‘Theory’ has a capital T - its most usual meaning in current debates in art criticism, signifying poststructuralist theories which investigate the cultural construction of gendered identity in language, representation (including visual representation) and psychic processes (Wolff 1995, 17). She continues, explaining that while the academy as an institution may exist as a place of privilege, when it comes to “the exploration of ideas, histories, and interdisciplinary projects”, it is also, “a primary area for education and the dissemination of ideas” (Wolff 1995, 18). Wolff also asserts that even though the academy is a space occupied mostly by men, women should not be apologetic about “the marginal activities that go on there” (Wolff 1995, 18). Thus, while feminist scholarship continues to sit uncomfortably inside the gates of the academy, I have come to see that it is from this uncomfortable and at times contradictory position that a rigorous feminist research position can be found. Women have always contributed to the production of new knowledge. It has only been recently however, through a more vocal and disseminated feminist scholarship that began with the second wave of feminisms in the 1960s, that this has been accepted generally throughout the social sciences (Hesse-Biber, Leavy & Yaiser 2004, 3; Haggis 2013, 69). While feminist scholarship has become more visible, it is still ‘othered’ in the humanities, and then again within the hierarchy of the academy. As Hesse-Biber, Leavy and Yaiser point out, the “objective sciences are commonly dubbed ‘hard’ and deal solely with facts” and “subjective sciences…are considered ‘soft’ and deal more with interpretations and feelings” (Hesse-Biber, Leavy and Chapter 3: Research Design 81 Yaiser 2004, 6). The terms ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ can be, according to Hesse-Biber et al, considered “gender metaphors – the masculine is hard and logical, and the feminine is soft and emotional”. ‘Soft’ and ‘emotional’ aren’t words that are often associated with serious academic scholarship, which calls into question the structure of the academy and its relationship to gender. Sara Delamont notes in her analysis of contemporary sociology and social theory textbooks that, “despite 30 years of the feminist critiques of the orthodox history of the discipline, the recent accounts share with those written in the 1960s an adherence to a simplistic and uncritical all-male grand narrative” (Delamont 2003, 159). Anne Witz and Barbara Marshall confirm the central status of the male grand narrative in the academy stating that, “masculinity, and the male it inscribes, continues to operate as a core constitutive category of the social/cultural” (Witz and Marshall in Skeggs 2008, 672). Therefore, while the general consensus is that feminist scholarship is by and large an “everyday occurrence” (Delamont 2003) within the area of the social sciences, this is not the case. Research relating to women and gender studies were traditionally situated under the rubric of feminist studies, but there has been a decline in this identification. The quantity of scholarship undertaken in the area of feminist research within the field of sociology would suggest that it is not only accepted, but common practice. However, Delamont claims that academics are still having to be coerced into taking “feminist perspectives seriously, to cite women, to read women’s work, and to confess to previous sexist sins of omission and commission” (Delamont 2003, ix). Griselda Pollock (2010, 795) poses a similar dilemma for art historical research in the academy when she asks, “Why has modernist culture been so unable imaginatively to 82 Chapter 3: Research Design integrate women’s creativity into its narratives of radicalism, innovation, dissidence, or transgression?” The dilemma of “omission and commission” (Delamont 2003, ix) and the marginalisation shared by feminists in the social sciences and visual arts in having their voices heard as they investigate “the cultural construction of gendered identity in language, representation (including visual representation) and psychic processes” (Wolff 1995, 17). These ideas demonstrate, for me, why the ‘personal is political’ resonates strongly in my own construction of voice in the structure of the academy. It is for these reasons that I have come to accept the vital role feminist scholarship plays in feminist practice, in spite of my discomfort with the academy. If there is to be a change in the accessibility of knowledge by shifting its structure, then we must do so from the inside, in as many varied ways as we can. Academic language has felt foreign to me from the beginning. While I ‘spoke it’ in my undergraduate degree, I was merely appropriating this language, as I understood was expected. In developing my own academic voice, I looked to the vast amounts of work done in the mid 1970s to the mid 1980s in terms of women’s writing, including “l’écriture feminine” (feminine writing), a term coined by Hélène Cixous in response to Lacan’s view that language is structured around the phallus (Klages 2012, 71). Women of this time, both in and out of the academy were embracing their new voice, and while some women were liberated by this new method of feminine writing, while others found it to be essentialist and not productive to the cause (Moi 2008). It is in the various approaches to writing, both feminine and otherwise that I found the space in which to develop my own. Thus, the construction of the feminist voice continues to hold theoretical importance to new researchers and writers. Feminist theory[s] “preoccupied with questions relating to women and creativity, women and Chapter 3: Research Design 83 writing, women and the production of art” are vital for the continuation of feminist research (Moi 2008, 260). Toril Moi claims that feminist theory stopped being concerned with women and writing, and attributes this partially to poststructuralism and deconstructive approaches that deliberately ignore the author, as well as Judith Butler’s work in Gender Trouble (1990), where she disputes the very category of “woman” (Moi 2008). Moi argues that the relationship between theory and practice is in a similar position now to the one it held in the late 1980s, “in which one half of the brain continues to read women writers, while the other continues to think that the author is dead, and that the very word “woman” is theoretically dodgy” (Moi 2008, 264). She states that the result of this is that women either spend much of their writing apologising for their method, or not writing at all (Moi 2008). When I discovered Moi, I found the notion of feminine writing to be both exhilarating and empowering. However, I quickly began to feel uncomfortable with the idea of women’s writing; this too, felt like a voice that was not mine. Like Casely Coan I am dubious of the essentialism involved in these sorts of approaches to writing. I reject the idea of a certain “femaleness” (Coan 2012, 9), instead aiming to engage with the patriarchal structures contained within the academy. In her dissertation It feels (w)ri(gh)t(e) to me: Feminist identity and academic writing, Coan suggests that, while gender studies have been widely accepted throughout the academy over the last thirty years, “academic writing has not undergone the same interrogation” as gender roles in society (Coan 2012, 1). Coan defines academic writing as an “adherence to and performance of disciplinary conventions, argument 84 Chapter 3: Research Design defined by discursive violence, writing to an audience instead of for the self and the inability to incorporate the feeling self into the thinking self’s text” and proposes that this is problematic for those wanting to write using a feminist methodology and/or “non-traditional voices” (Coan 2012, 2). In imagining a new form of feminist academic writing, Coan does not claim a direct departure from traditional methods, instead urging for an approach that extends traditional academic writing in order to provide a more flexible and generous approach (Coan 2012, 2). I connect with Coan’s (2012, 52-53) assertion that we write, “so that we might voice the changes we hope to see in the world and, perhaps most importantly, to share that vision with others…and to be understood” (Coan 2012, 52-53). As Hilary E. Hughes and Mark D. Vagle note, however “if we do what we’ve always done, then we’ll always get what we’ve always got” (Hughes and Vagle 2014, 258). I explore and employ my own voice both in the creative outputs of this project and in the writing of the research in the hope that through my contribution to the various attempts to disrupt the patriarchal voice, there will one day be change. I hope that everyone— from all gender identities—may be and voice themselves in a way that is authentically theirs, while still considered as contributing to the ever-growing body of knowledge. The practice-based and feminist methodological approaches of this PhD have enabled me to openly engage with the process of traditional, practice-based, and feminist research strategies, and subsequently discover and develop my own voice from this constellation of experiences, ideas and forms. Allowing the practice to drive the research has meant the research has been at times messy and seemingly Chapter 3: Research Design 85 disconnected. However, developing the methodological trope of the tentative gesture over the course of the project has to given shape to the hesitancies, uncertainties and paradoxes that characterise creative research. It has enabled me to embrace the collaborative processes, uncomfortable reflexivity, dialogue, exchange and narrative and utilise these things as a method of critique that allows for reverence through the lens of humour: the tentative gesture has enabled me to negotiate the terrain and firmly find my position as a researcher amongst the mess. Consequently, while I do not claim to have come up with any definitive answers to the issues that I am engaging with in this project, I have developed a voice that can authentically contribute and is contributing to the various and ongoing discussions of gender inequity in the visual arts. 86 Chapter 3: Research Design Chapter 4: The Work This chapter will focus on the creative work produced throughout this PhD from February 2009 to present. It is in this work that the key findings of the research and the contributions to knowledge are located. As the project is grounded in practicebased research, resulting in a sequential body of work rather than a final creative project or exhibition, I will discuss a key selection of works rather than the body of work in its entirety26. Throughout the course of this project I have produced a substantial body of work that explores the relationship between the modernist canon, feminist approaches to enquiry and my art practice. My analysis of the work has shown there have been three particular conceptual trajectories that have developed out of the creative research outputs: collaboration and faux-llaboration as a feminist strategy for critiquing the patriarchal structures of the art world; romantic love as a persistent ironic metaphor for gender positions and relations and text, language and the development of my voice in order to present my authentic self. I will then discuss how these trajectories came together in the final exhibition of the PhD, It’s Complicated. My works embrace play [both with words and forms], chance, humour and the dialogic as essential methods and strategies for making political art, and often involve the recontexualising of found objects [as a rejection of a ‘mastery’ of art], while also enabling the formation of critical perspectives on gender inequality and 26 To view all the works please see the accompanying book. Chapter 4: The Work 87 patriarchal structures. It is this interaction between play and politics that drives my practice and this research project. The first line of inquiry that will be discussed in this chapter is collaboration and faux-llaboration, the latter being a term I have devised for a series of works that embrace a fictional collaborative practice. I will unpack the concept of fauxllaboration as a useful method with which to engage with the history of art in order to explore and critique my position as an early-career, female artist. Secondly, I will highlight how the practice makes use of romantic love as an emergent and persistent metaphor for gendered dynamics in society. More precisely, I will highlight how this metaphor has proven to be an effective tool for creatively engaging with and critiquing heteronormative, patriarchal construction of gender. Thirdly, I will consider the relevance of text, language and voice to the project through the discussion of a selection of text-based works that have been produced throughout this project. Finally, I will discuss the culmination of these distinct approaches in the final exhibition It’s Complicated. COLLABORATION The first hint that collaboration was to become an important branch of my practice came in 2008, when I co-founded the artist-run initiative, No Frills*27 with my Honours studio peers, Catherine Sagin, Kate Woodcroft and Michelle Woulahan (AKA Antoinette J. Citizen). An important step in my understanding of the value of collaboration, No Frills* was dedicated to supporting and exhibiting critically engaged, early career artists. Following on from this project, a significant 27 88 *Frills may be included. No Frills* operated from 2008-2011. Chapter 4: The Work collaborative relationship developed with Antoinette J. Citizen. While we have, todate, completed only a small selection of works together28, the collaborative process involved with working with Antoinette J. Citizen has continued to impact the way I think about making work. As an ongoing dialogue and expansion of ideas, our collaborative relationship provided me with a discursive space from which to question and subsequently broaden my thinking and making processes. My growing awareness of the inequalities in the art world, and the role of gender in this inequality has inspired my interest and involvement in feminist political action. As a consequence, I co-founded the feminist artist-run initiative and collective, LEVEL, with fellow Brisbane-based artists Rachael Haynes and Alice Lang in January 2010. We originally intended LEVEL to function as a single curatorial project showcasing local women artists. However, it fast turned into a permanent art space that housed three galleries, nine studios for local artists and a studio residency program, which ran from 2010-2012. In late 2012, LEVEL evolved once again into a more project-based exhibition and residency program, and it is currently operating in a mode that is chiefly focused on collective/community-engaged dialogic actions. The structure of the program and the team of co-directors has shifted and expanded to include artists Caitlin Franzmann, Anita Holtsclaw and Courtney Pedersen, and reflects our particular approach to feminist, collaborative and non-hierarchical engagement with the art world. While my involvement with LEVEL has been a chief area of collaborative activity, I have also developed other significant collaborative relationships as extensions of my 28 Including Mortamalism (2009), Citizen Coombs Wins! (2010), Checkmate (2010) and Palais de Tokyo (2010-2011). Chapter 4: The Work 89 studio practice. In particular, I have worked separately with Brisbane-based artists Brooke Ferguson and Caitlin Franzmann. While operating in significantly different ways, both these collaborations have expanded my understanding of making and collaborative processes. Ferguson and I have worked together sporadically since 2011, exploring our shared interests by creating gestural offerings of works that take place in public parks and exist for only an hour or two at a time. For these projects we embraced the Fluxus approach to making art in the form of the Happening29. Our process involved developing the premise of an event together, separating to develop our ideas, and then coming together again in the public space for the event. In this way, the exhibition site acts as the space where we develop our provisional ideas and provide critical feedback to each other; we would then step back and allow the works to enter into a visual and theoretical ‘conversation’ with one other at the time of the event. The collaborative process with Franzmann functioned differently. This relationship developed out of a fortuitous opportunity provided to develop a new collaborative work. I was invited by curator Rachael Parsons to take part in a residency and exhibition program that focused specifically on the notion of collaboration, and I, in turn, invited Caitlin to enter into a twelve week collaborative working process with me. We embraced the process of working together as an opportunity to test whether the space of collaboration could result in a truly equal exchange. The resulting work, Focus (2013) presented two helmets attached by a metal bar, facing each other, with a different sound work playing in each (one of peaceful music, the other of an 29 Happenings in the 1950s and 1960s stemmed from theatre, but were not theatre; they were events that operated in galleries, lofts and in public spaces for generally small audiences and related to the everyday by incorporating commonplace objects and materials (Kirby 1995, 8). 90 Chapter 4: The Work instructional recording that guides the wearer through the process of making eye contact). Audience members are invited to operate in pairs to engage with the work. Once they have the helmets in place, they are forced to look at each other, or if they are to look away, they can only avert their eyes; their heads must remain facing one another. In the development of Focus, Franzmann and I were interested in exploring our shared interest in the gallery as a space for engagement, and a shared observation that art galleries and opening events and activities in the world more broadly are more fast paced than ever before. We were interested in facilitating a more considered and direct connection between people, and encouraging them to have a shared, but separate experience of it. We wanted this shared experience to provoke a conversation between the participants after they have removed themselves from the work. While the collaborative process with Ferguson adopted an improvised approach to developing ephemeral works, this collaboration was about creating intimate experiences [unusual in the social muddle of an opening] and conversations that mirrored the reflective, dialogical processes of collaboration itself. As a consequence of these partnerships, collaboration has become an increasingly fundamental element of my practice. The dialogic nature of collaboration has assisted in the journey towards discovering my artistic voice, as well as having an impact on me at a more personal level. I have found that it provides space for a complex meeting of voices, dialogues and exchanges and provides a better understanding of others, as well as a healthy corrective to the [seemingly neverending] patriarchal myth of an autonomous engagement with art. Collaborative practice has assisted me in engaging with and reconciling what John-Steiner calls “conflicting styles of work, temperament, values, and role expectations” (John- Chapter 4: The Work 91 Steiner 2000, 100). It has made a lasting impact on who I am as a researcher, a practitioner, a teacher, and a mother, and has enabled me to more critically and creatively consider and who I am in the world more broadly. In her discussion of women’s collaboration, Vera John-Steiner describes the practice of “connected knowing” as relying on: an integration of perception, insight, analogies, and empathetic understanding. Such an integration of different modes of thought may be more available to those…whose responsibilities span the private and public spheres, and who have the ability to shift between work-related and care-related concerns (John-Steiner 2000, 101). The relationship between work and care that John-Steiner refers to is highly relevant to my own experience of collaboration. This is particularly true in the case of LEVEL where, we are as focused on the work that is being produced as we are in our desire to support and promote each other, women artists, and be involved in dialogue about the institutionalised oppression of women in the art world and society as a whole. I find John-Steiner’s assertion that the “variations in men’s and women’s collaborative engagement are the outcome of social, rather than biological, forces” (John-Steiner 2000, 102) to be a powerful observation that forms a useful context for my own suspicion of hierarchical and/or authoritarian structures as self-creating and self-justifying. It is this apprehension that forms the basis of my alternative model of fictive collaboration, faux-llaboration. FAUX-LLABORATION In my undergraduate practice I created an alter ego from which to make and show my work, as a way to gain the perceived heroic aura of many 20th century male 92 Chapter 4: The Work artists. Then, returning to my own persona, I produced work that responded to prominent [hero] artists, such as Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Bruce Nauman. Through a study of conversation transcripts and articles detailing various interviews with the artists, and/or articles written by these iconic artists, I initially sought to capture the attitude and ego I believed an artist needed in order to succeed. However, I soon realised that this would not result in work or a practice that would be authentically. Rather I began developing fictional conversations and relationships with iconic artists and/or their artworks, remaining conscious of their personas and processes, and synthesising their forms and materials specifically from my perspective as an emerging female, Brisbane-based artist. As a way to find my own voice, I learned the language of others, embraced it, questioned it, and then ultimately rejected it. At this time, the Minimalist [visual] language was one that I could relate to more easily than most other modernist languages. It spoke to me through the materials, forms and the presence that these elements brought to the world. I could understand it, and yet I understood that it wasn’t my voice. As Elizabeth Grosz notes: Within patriarchal cultures and representational systems there is no space and few resources women may utilize in order to speak, desire, and create as women. For this reason women must become familiar with the patriarchal discourses, knowledges and social practices which define and constrain them: these provide the only sources and tools against patriarchy. Only through its own techniques can patriarchy be challenged and displaced (Grosz 1989, 133). Chapter 4: The Work 93 When I attempted to use the language of these seminal30 artists however, I felt like an imposter, a young, female, uncertain [baby] artist from Brisbane attempting to speak with the assumed confidence, of a male, middle-aged New Yorker [as most of them were]. So I brought my own materials and approaches to the conversation and somehow, this mismatch worked. The deliberate clumsiness of the materials and processes that I utilised made it explicitly clear that I was not simply mimicking these artists; I was quoting them, but also realised I was playing with them, parodying them in my own voice and my own tone. This approach to making evolved into a more considered questioning of the social and political expectations that are placed on artists, and the language and value of art, and who sets up and maintains the structures we [particularly women] operate within. Similarly to Grosz’s previously noted description31, I began to acknowledge that I am working [though initially unknowingly] within the boundaries of the structures that I am critiquing. Grosz’s observations echo Derrida’s framing of deconstruction, which in turn provides a critical context for my faux-llaborative works. He suggests: The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible, nor effective, nor can they take accurate aims except my inhabiting those structures, inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure (Derrida 1996, 24). 30 Defined as “strongly influencing later developments” as well as “relating to or denoting semen” (Oxford Dictionary), seminal is a fine example of the linguistic tyranny against women that continues to this day. As Carolee Schneemann notes, “Language itself excludes us constantly.” 31 As quoted on p. 94. 94 Chapter 4: The Work Derrida’s idea of deconstruction as revealing the political investments and discourses of the predominant institutional structures is complex, complicated and inherently contradictory, much like my relationship with the modernist canon. Connecting with these qualities of deconstruction allowed me to acknowledge the often-contradictory elements of attempting to find my voice through the act of fauxllaborating with the canonical figures of modern art, were necessary. I had to ‘inhabit’ these sites, and use my own observations and experiences of those fictional dialogues to find a different, authentic voice within the institutionalised structures of art in order to explore ways to redefine it for a feminist practice. As a way to explore my position as a female artist, I imagined relationships with iconic male artists. I would creatively and playfully engage in a fictive dialogue with them and their work. We would faux-llaborate. In my faux-llaborations, I would most often I would engage with a work that spoke to me, or with an interview or article on an artist that I found interesting, engaging or frustrating, and I would respond to it; I would imagine what our collaborative dialogue would sound like and develop the work from there. These faux-llaborations made the process of generating ideas, and forming explicit critiques realisable and as it has developed over the course of the project, fauxllaboration also served as a critique of the gendered status of art. As Tom Barone and Elliot W. Eisner explain: Works of fiction may indeed, through their recasting of the empirical particulars of the world, achieve extraordinary power to disturb and disrupt the familiar and commonplace, to question and interrogate that which seems to have already been answered conclusively, and to redirect Chapter 4: The Work 95 the conversation regarding important social issues (Barone and Eisner 2012, 101). By highlighting these fictive collaborations with iconic artists and their practices, I aim to disrupt the common assumption that women have achieved equality in the art world. The works embrace the ambivalent position of reverence and critique, of ‘double affirmation.’ By engaging directly with seminal works produced by male artists, within the context of contemporary art and from a feminist position, the resulting works act as both a nod to, and disruption of their importance in the [male] canon. Things (Soulmates) Things (Soulmates) (2010) is one of the earliest artworks that explicitly explores my idea of faux-llaboration. Stemming from previous explorations into the material value of art and art objects, I was interested in developing a parallel lightness of both concept and material. In the lead up to Try a Little Kindness, an exhibition that I was involved with at the LEVEL gallery with fellow co-directors, Alice Lang and Rachael Haynes, I was struggling to pin down a solid idea for the show. When I considered the various concepts, materials and objects I had deliberated over for the exhibition, they all just felt like an amalgamation of ‘things’. Embracing the incidental and everyday processes of accumulating and responding to things provided the idea on which to base the work, which subsequently resulted as a straightforward delivery of the word as text. 96 Chapter 4: The Work Figure 4.1 Courtney Coombs things (Soulmates) 2010 As I often do as part of my process, I (re)turned to revered and familiar artists to begin a ‘discussion’ about thoughts and processes that I was navigating through, and (re)discovered Martin Creed’s work Work no. 338 (THINGS) (2004). Whether this (re)discovery was a happy accident or came directly from my subconscious, I celebrated this overt connection and the relationship I felt with Creed and his work through the production and the titling of the work. And so commenced the deliberate, fictive collaborative relationships I call faux-llaborations. The use of the word things mirrors Creed’s Work no. 228 (THINGS), but unlike Creed’s industrial grade neon work, mine was deliberately low definition, constructed by tacking fairy lights to the wall with removable adhesive, with a clear office push pin acting as the dot at the top of the letter ‘i’. Resembling DIY festive decorations, the work is a somewhat pitiful attempt to replicate the production values of neon text-based art often associated the modernist practices of the 1960s and onwards. Thus, in our collaborative dialogue, Creed and I were talking about the same ‘things’, but our respective experiences and presentation of them were very different; His was symbolically authoritative and absurd while mine was domestically humble and quietly cheerful. This faux- Chapter 4: The Work 97 llaboration with Creed opened up the possibility of thinking through the complicated and contradictory dialogues I was inhabiting in a playful and humorous ways while still observing a critical stance in my conversation with art. Figure 4.2 Martin Creed Work no. 228 (THINGS) 2004 http://martincreed.com/site/works/work-no-338 As with many of the works that that have been produced as part of this PhD, Things (Soulmates) presents itself as a provisional, or perfunctory artwork, which could be viewed as lazy and/or unresolved, I have come to understand this as the presentation of the ‘tentative proposal’. Deliberate in approach and presentation, I liken this approach to making to Raphael Rubinstein’s term “provisionality.” Rubinstein (2009, 123) defines provisionality as, “works that look casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling”. While Rubinstein uses this term for artists who use painting as their primary medium, I understand this term to be relevant to a number of artistic processes. In defining provisionality, Rubinstein (2009) discusses a group of “younger” artists who reject the artificial make-up of the art world by turning away from “technical competence [and] refined sensibility,” to present works that 98 Chapter 4: The Work appear unfinished. In separating provisional painting from the “bad paintings” of the 1970s, Rubenstein argues that: Provisional painting is not about making last paintings, nor is it about the deconstruction of painting. It’s the finished product disguised as a preliminary stage, or a body double standing in for a star/masterpiece whose value would put a stop to artistic risk. To put it another way: provisional painting is major painting masquerading as minor painting (Rubinstein 2009, 134). I utilise this notion of the provisional in my own works as a strategy for critiquing the principle of ‘mastery’ that remains prevalent in contemporary art. This is why my faux-llaborations take place [primarily] with male artists. In the process of fauxllaborating with these artists I appropriate the structural investment in mastery through deliberate and playful dialogue with their work/s. Spread (with Bob) Spread (with Bob) (2011) is another example of my approach to faux-llaboration, in which I form a fictional collaboration with an existing work by a celebrated male artist. In 2010 we (the No Frills* directors) were invited to take part in Eastern Seaboard (2011), an exhibition curated by Rueben Keehan for Artspace, Sydney, which explored “the conditions, conceptual frameworks and creativity of artist collectives operating in Australia’s urbanised southeast” (Artspace 2011). In response to our combined interest in the collaborative and collective model, we worked with the idea of “proposing new methods of collaboration in the hope of addressing [our] ‘ambivalent desire’ to connect with other artists at home and Chapter 4: The Work 99 abroad” (Artspace 2011). Sagin and Woodcroft collaborated with each other and fellow Brisbane-based ARI, Boxcopy (who were in a residency in Singapore at the time); Citizen collaborated with a robot she constructed; and I faux-llaborated with Robert Rauschenburg. Figure 4.3 Courtney Coombs Spread (with Bob) 2011 On a research trip to New York City in the lead up to the exhibition, I visited the retrospective exhibition of Rauschenberg, ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG (2010). A quote from the artist selected for the press release is as follows: The thing that’s been a constant over all these years is that I believe that art is communication so that the message has to change with time… If I can possibly show to anyone that the world belongs to them, to each person, then the work is successful. And if I succeed in being a great artist, then there won’t be any need for artists any more (Rauschenberg in Gagosian 2010). On viewing the exhibition, I felt compelled to work with this artist; I was genuinely enamoured with the work and his ideas, but was equally astounded by the ego 100 Chapter 4: The Work associated with his persona. In line with previous works I had produced in response to key modernist male artists, I began to imagine the potential collaboration that would take place between Rauschenberg and myself, with the work Untitled (Spread) as the launch pad. I was fascinated by the use of the umbrellas in this work as well as his ambition to be “a great artist, [so] there won’t be the need for artists anymore” (Rauschenberg in Gagosian 2010). This coincided with my anxiety about developing work for exhibition and engaging with the socially fraught situation of the opening event. Figure 4.4 Robert Rauschenburg, Untitled (Spread) 1983 http://artobserved.com/2010/11/go-see-new-york-robert-rauschenberg-at-gagosian-gallery-west-21ststreet-october-29-through-december-18-2010/ The combination of these elements resulted in Spread (with Bob), three pink umbrellas, with the sound of rain filling the underside of the hood of the umbrella via small speakers, which were placed throughout the gallery. Viewers were invited to pick them up and use them, to experience the exhibition from the shelter of the umbrellas, the soothing sound of rain gently dropping above their heads as they moved around the space, encountering the other works. The work activated both a Chapter 4: The Work 101 point of reference and a conversation with Rauschenberg about art and non-art objects, discussing to whom the art world ‘belongs’. The umbrellas became poetically functional objects for manoeuvring through the space, rather than as something to be admired. They served two functions: while dormant, they were sculptural forms that invited the viewer to imagine them outside of the gallery, walking around in the rain; while activated they served as an anti-art-object32, a theatrical prop of sorts that changed the way audience members negotiated both the site (the gallery), and the works in it. Consequence (after Richard) Consequence (after Richard) (2011) depicts a large-scale drippy, broken heart painted in black acrylic paint directly onto the gallery wall. This work was a fauxllaboration with iconic Minimalist artist, Richard Serra. I have long felt a connection with Serra’s approach to material form and this was intensified after experiencing his Torqued Ellipse works at Dia:Beacon. I fell in love with the work, and [in my complicated way] with him. Experiencing the strength, power and communicative ability of his objects changed my view of the world, they brought a new awareness of my body in space, inside the gallery and out. I also fell deeply in love with Serra’s large-scale black bitumen wall paintings, works that are powerfully seductive engagements with space. Serra’s works epitomise all that is considered masculine about Minimal Art; they do so in both their confident application and presence in space. 32 As discussed by Thomas McEvilley, “Anti-art is not […] a non-art; it may simply be a case of art that attempts to turn the dominant art of its time upside down and expose its underside—the side that is usually repressed […] turning traditional premises against themselves” (McEvilley 2005, 17), 102 Chapter 4: The Work Figure 4.5 Richard Serra Consequence 2003 http://www.diaart.org/exhibitions/introduction/96 While engaging in a [fictional] conversation with Serra about the power and grandeur of his objects, I was also exploring various symbols related to romantic love. As a result of multiple upheavals in my personal life, I was thinking about broken-heart drawings, how they are often associated with teenage girls, and their perceived symbolic correlation with the secretive nature and intimate scale of feminine weakness, as something that would never be produced by a ‘boy’. The combination of these ideas and my own morbid sense of humour resulted in a decision to turn this perceived gendered weakness on its head, transforming it into the kind of bold statement Serra might suggest I make if I followed his ‘advice’, which was given to me through a fictional dialogue with his character [as seen in various interviews] and his work. I highlighted the faux-llaboration with Serra through including the title of his work, Consequence (2003) and his name in the title of my work. Chapter 4: The Work 103 Figure 4.6 Courtney Coombs Consequence (after Richard) 2011 Two large, opaque shapes take up a large portion of the curved wall, angled away from each other, leaving blank wall space in between the two halves of a whole, which appears to be a free-flowing and imperfect love heart. A kind of juvenile, cartoonish cleaving of this symbol of love, both slightly funny and sad, the work has impact owing to its scale. Unlike the childish [read: girlish] images of love hearts drawn on school exercise books, this love heart has been branded onto the very structure of the gallery, with large and full brush strokes. The ‘masculine’ action of making a large-scale black painting directly onto the gallery wall turned the image into a parody of sorts, a graffiti-like drawing that ironically played with my personal ambivalence regarding the institutions of both love and art. To me, the work is cringe-worthily funny: it’s a huge, ugly, broken heart painted directly onto the gallery wall! As previously discussed, I often use humour in my work as a strategy for disrupting modes of oppression relating to gender and sexuality, such was the intention for this work. As Heike Munder claims: 104 Chapter 4: The Work Humour is an important weapon against the affirmative position of society, for all too easily the laughs are appropriated by the powerful. Humour used as a political tool has the effect of relieving and releasing pressure. But does humour not in fact take the position of the oppressed too lightly, so that an apparently hopeless situation is attacked via humour in order not to be crushed by it (Munder 2005, 21). The act of painting a drippy broken heart on the wall in response to Serra’s hardedged minimal blocks of painting is not only a pathetically funny gesture, it is also a political one; it raises questions of the symbolism of gender, experience and value in the institutions of art. The process of faux-llaborating with this particular iconic masculine artist, in combination with the large, and opaquely black wall painting, was a strategy to understand and develop my position as a young, early career female artist and to subsequently use this position as the catalyst for making work. Pink Things Pink Things (2011) is one of the first examples of a work that started as a straight faux-llaboration, and evolved into a work that expanded this position by inserting additional elements into the work. On a sheet of Masonite, resting on two trestle legs, sits a scrunched up A4 sheet of pink paper (a faux-llaboration with Martin Creed and his work, Work no. 88 (1995)) and a glittery, pearlescent pink butt plug. Chapter 4: The Work 105 Figure 4.7 Courtney Coombs Pink Things 2011 When developing a conceptual outline for a work I often turn to materials to assist in the resolution of the work, and the idea and the material/s work in dialogue with each other, and the space to form the final presentation. I source materials and concepts from all sorts of venues and experiences. In the case of this work, as an extension into my research into ‘romantic’ gestures and objects, I became fascinated by the objects in the sex store. I was attracted to the various objects’ formal qualities and their striking resemblance to much modernist sculpture, and I imagined them placed in the art gallery amongst my other work. The butt plugs, in particular, resembled Minimalist sculptures33 that could be erected in a public space [like an obelisk: inherently male, phallic, present]. There was a large selection of visually harsh [and somewhat terrifying] apparatuses in the store, however, the softer, more delicate shapes and colours attracted my sustained attention. The silicone material and pearlescent pink colouring of this particular object were quite beautiful as a readymade visual form. I felt it would serve as the perfect accompaniment for the pink scrunched-up piece of paper. By placing these two objects side by side on a 33 See Paul McCarthy’s work for other examples of butt plugs turned into sculptural objects. 106 Chapter 4: The Work piece of industrial Masonite, resting on trestles, the forms, textures and colours became a prominent element of the work. For viewers aware of Minimal Art and/or Creed’s work, the reference is clear as he has produced a number of these works, exploring, to use Dale McFarland’s words, “expansion and contraction” in a way that engages with the legacy of Minimalist practice (McFarland 2000). For those who don’t know the field, the quotidian ordinariness of the work might provoke questions about the context and value of the art object, just as Creed’s does. Figure 4.8 Martin Creed Work No. 88 1995 http://martincreed.com/site/works/work-no-88 The work was intended to be multifaceted; its position in the gallery inviting seriousness from the viewer upon first engagement, and then opening up the experience to awkwardness and/or humour as they become aware of the primary use of the pearlescent pink object. In the words of Jayne Wark regarding feminist art that employs humour as a strategy, “the aim of such humour […] is not to soften the political point in order to make it more palatable and less offensive but to soften up the audience in order to make it more receptive to the political critique itself, for this Chapter 4: The Work 107 has always been the point of feminist art” (Wark 2006, 204). Pink Things is definitely not trying to be more palatable! This work does, however, utilise humour as a way to engage the viewer in a conversation that has long been understood as uncomfortable for many, for example the politics of sexual preference and play. As well as being humorous, the reference in Pink Things to Minimalist sculpture and the Postminimalist practice of Creed, in combination with the colour pink [which continues to be associated with femaleness], speaks about gender, frustration, scale and subsequently my position as a young, female artist trying to grapple with the centuries of history that has taught me much of what I know about the world. Highflying The next two works, Highflying (2014) and Flying High (2014) are not fauxllaborations with specific artists, but instead function as dialogues with the notion of ‘mastery’ in art, specifically using geometric or hard edge abstract painting style as vehicle through which to discuss my bone of contention with the structures of art. Figure 4.9 Courtney Coombs Highflying 2014 Image Credit: Erika Scott 108 Chapter 4: The Work Highflying was produced for one of the events that Brooke Ferguson and I delivered, in Highgate Hill Park, Brisbane. Our process of developing individual works to be shown together involved numerous meetings at the site, a dialogic exchange of ideas and feedback, and time. I was interested in the notion of what success means in the art world, when financial success is so unlikely for contemporary artists, and wanted to explore the term highflying as it is used to describe those who receive some measure of success, whether it be financial or more conceptually achieved. Figure 4.10 Brooke Ferguson Highflying 2014 http://www.brookekferguson.com/courtney-coombs-and-brooke-ferguson.html Feeling at odds with the slippery notion of ‘success’ that is often defined by the institutions of art, I wanted to extend upon the previous works I had produced, where I took the outside environment to the gallery. I love watching people fly kites, and the closing scene in Mary Poppins (1964) is one that can still restore my good humour. Consequently, I wanted to explore the non-art activity of flying kites in the non-art venue of the park, but with the intention of making art, creating a performative art event without the usual contextualising reference points for art. In Chapter 4: The Work 109 this respect, the act of flying the kites symbolised the complicated and tenuous relationship between art and life. I purchased two kites, chosen for their brightly coloured geometric patterns, and invited friends and colleagues to the performance at the park on a Friday afternoon. Participants flew kites, and at the same time bear witness to Ferguson’s performance work, in which she attached a broom to a rope and proceeded to perform in the park for half an hour, throwing and retrieving the broom over the course of that time. In the act of inviting people to come to the park on a Friday afternoon to fly kites that resembled abstract paintings, and engage in conversation about art outside of the confines of the traditional gallery, Highflying proposed a critique of the role of the institution, and the gallery/museum in particular, as well as challenging ideas about mastery and/or the value of art. I was also [somewhat cheekily] poking my tongue out, not at the institution but at myself, for desiring to participate in the structures that I had long been participating in. I created a scenario where we could eliminate hierarchy and inequity and all become ‘highflyers’. In one sense, I was making fun of myself and my desires and anxieties about art in general in order to feel stronger in my position as an artist. This kind of selfeffacement seemed to be a necessary act to achieve liberation. As Heike Munder points out, “humour [as] self-persiflage [self-questioning/self-mockery]—a selfpersiflage that draws strength from its own vulnerability. A humour that is subversive does not permit the fronts to strengthen, but instead utilizes travesty to shine through the system and expand itself into liberated spaces” (Munder 2007, 110 Chapter 4: The Work 213). This work acts as an example of my desire to own my complicity in the structures that I am responding to, in my position as both accomplice and critic. By inviting others to join in a collective response, I am using humour to transform a critique of institutionalised art and my contested position within them into a setting more focussed on engaging a sense of community and joy. Flying High As an extension of Highflying, Flying High took various elements from the outdoor event and then re-purposed them for the exhibition In Pursuit of Magic. Again, there were two kites, this time with a more hard edge abstraction appearance, but instead of existing in their original form, they were fixed to the top of two pieces of dowel, thus becoming sculptural assemblage forms. The work, resting in the corner of the gallery, expresses ideas about taking outdoor non-art activities and [re]transplanting them into the context of the gallery. In anticipation of the exhibition I imagined the joy of the Highflying event symbolically activating the oft-sterile site of the gallery. By taking the simple, yet magical experience of flying kites and enabling this activity to potentially take place in a space of quiet and contemplation, I was hoping to connect audience members with a whimsical moment that might take place outside the gallery space. While the kites were available to the audience to fly around the space, I did not provide instructions to do so, and they remained dormant for the duration of the three-week exhibition. I had imagined people walking/running/skipping around the gallery, kites in the air and the streamers trailing behind them; however, given the unspoken rules of the gallery the kites were simply glanced at. Chapter 4: The Work 111 Figure 4.11 Courtney Coombs Flying High 2014 Image Credit: Christo Crocker The kites in Highflying and Flying High can be seen as a metaphor for the illusion of freedom, but also as a metaphor for art in general and painting in particular, the titles reference feelings associated with achieving success. In this way, the kites were representative of my feelings about movement away from the conventional structures of the art world, which include the gallery, and the desire to ‘succeed’. The works also reinforced the value of the collaborative/communal activities I partake in. These works provided a genuine space in which to operate as a feminist and an artist, through dialogue and shared goals and play. ROMANTIC LOVE AS IRONIC METAPHOR Approximately two years into the PhD, I became increasingly aware of my position and experience as a gendered other in the art world. Following on from my collaborations, faux-llaborations, and imagined love affairs with artists such as Richard Serra, Donald Judd, and Robert Morris as a part of the faux-llaborative process, I began investigating the parallels between the gender dynamic established 112 Chapter 4: The Work in the art world and the mythical constructs of heteronormative romantic relationships. This process directed the practice-based research to a more purposeful engagement with symbols of romantic love, which were employed as ironic metaphors for the critique of the modernist canon as well as the current state of the art world. It is sometimes proposed that women engage with love from a “feminized perspective” as, “emotional expression and talking about feelings” (Cancian 2001, 189), while men engage in “masculine” styles of love such as, “practical help, shared physical activities, spending time together, and sex” (Cancian 2001, 195). If women shift from this accepted pattern it can be seen as “demasculinizing” for the men of the world (Cancian 2001, 189). The fact that such clearly defined gender roles still exist in contemporary society has confounded me, forcing me to consider my own position in respect to these binaries. These binaries, and the heteronormativity of the roles in romance, have meant that it has taken time and dedication to even begin to unravel myself from this method of being. I align the mainstream understanding of romance with the art world in a number of ways, and I use this notion of feminine love as a key conceptual material for my work. Understanding my use of romantic love as a means to critique patriarchal structures has taken some time to evolve. However, through uncomfortable reflexivity34 I have come to understand that I use romantic gestures as signifiers, to question and critique the role of gender in the art world and society more broadly. Romantic love acts as a metaphor for expectation placed on me as a woman, and representations of romantic 34 As discussed in Chapter 3, p.75. Chapter 4: The Work 113 relationships as they still function in contemporary culture. It also functions as a conceptual approach for developing an understanding of a gendered engagement and response to the [male] modernist canon has been overarching to this project. Love connects us, as Alain Badiou states in conversation with Nicolas Truong: In today’s world, it is generally thought that individuals only pursue their own self-interest. Love is an antidote to that. […] It takes us into key areas of the experience of what is difference and, essentially, leads to the idea that you can experience the world from the perspective of difference. In this respect it has universal implications: it is an individual experience of potential universality (Badiou and Truong 2012, 16-17). Romantic love as a metaphor also acts as a way to interrupt what I, like many, see as a particular self-interest and individualism in art. Throughout this research I sought to create a space for a greater understanding of what an accepted research-based art practice might be. It was from this desire that I was able to further explore romantic love as metaphor as a strategy for critiquing gendered responses to the [male] modernist canon. The combination of metaphor and irony in these works allows me to connect with viewers in new ways, extending the symbols beyond straightforward representation into a critique of the power structures inherent in representation. While in metaphor the “relation between what is said and what is meant is one of similarity, whether this similarity is pre-existing or created by the metaphor,” in irony, “...the relation between what is said and meant is one of opposition” (Winner & Gardner 1993, 428). Therefore, the use of metaphor and irony problematises the symbolic idealism of romantic love and enables the critique of the various gendered inequities of the art 114 Chapter 4: The Work world in order to find my position and my voice in the debate/s around this very topic. I found love on a cold and icy day in Copenhagen I found love on a cold and icy day in Copenhagen (2011) came into being incidentally and yet has formed the basis for much of the practical and theoretical research since its conception. On a very cold and icy day in January 2011, I found myself walking aimlessly in Copenhagen, getting lost time and time again while slipping and sliding around the streets. Usually one to embrace and celebrate the nomadic travelling life, I was finding this particular travel experience isolating, lonely and uncomfortable. As the sun was setting and I was ready to give up and head back to my hostel I stumbled upon a gorgeous movie theatre, walked inside and purchased a ticket to see the next English-speaking movie screening. After entering the screening room, the image that I have captured for the work is the image I was met with. It felt like a warm embrace on a cold and lonely day. For what seemed like the first time that day, I smiled, and then I took a photograph. Figure 4.12 Courtney Coombs I found love on a cold and icy day in Copenhagen 2011 Chapter 4: The Work 115 While love can be multifaceted and not always tied to our romantic engagements, the symbol of the love heart is often appropriated as a sign of romance. This image that I encountered as I waited for my two hours of escape from the cold and lonely world outside, took me from feeling chilled and isolated, to warm, tranquil and connected in a heartbeat. It was at this point that I realised what a powerful metaphor symbols connected to romantic love are, and this realisation prompted a shift in my work toward explicitly utilising romantic symbols as a primary strategy for critique. The symbol of the love heart is identifiable to all, but presents individual readings depending of on the viewer’s life experiences. The setting of a nearly empty cinema is commonly understood as a place of entertainment and escape. I treasure a trip to the movie theatre, to become engulfed in someone else’s world for a couple of hours. I, like many others, have engaged with families and our friends in these spaces, been on dates, and some of us [like me] have learned to embrace the solo journey to the movie theatre as a treat excursion that provides relief from the outside world. I dearly love the movie theatre, in a way that is both nostalgic of these things as well as celebratory of all that this site continues to offer. The photograph of this space, which was taken on a small automatic digital camera, was presented at the intimate scale of 5x7inches. It presents but an offering, a small window through which the viewer is invited to imagine the space, and the experience of the warm, secure, imaginative space for themselves. It is this offering of an intimate moment that I have adopted for much of the work following, hoping that the 116 Chapter 4: The Work intimacy I present and/or experience when producing the work, will translate [albeit in an ambiguous manner] to the viewer. On Show On Show (2011) was produced in response to I found love on a cold and icy day in Copenhagen for the exhibition I fucking love you35 and was the first of two iterations of this work36. It was the first work in which I took my understanding of the potential for romantic metaphors to operate as a material for gendered critique into the gallery context. On Show is a [re]construction of the romantic symbol of the love heart I stumbled across in the movie theatre. I hoped to re-create this moment of tranquillity and peace, for myself, but also to share with a broader audience. In my attempt to recreate the shape of the heart from the theatre with two basic theatre cans became a clumsy affair, the theatre cans, placed on the ground close to the wall produced an ungainly light that created a cartoon-like rendition of the symbolic love heart. Once installed, I laughed – it was a bottom! My attempt to earnestly recreate my engagement with a heartfelt moment turned into a ‘bum’ joke. This ‘failure’ then, created a tension between the earnest and the puerile, the sacred and the profane, and has become a key element and subsequent outcome of the research undertaken in this project. 35 36 October 2011, Metro Arts, Brisbane. The second was, January 2011, QUT Art Museum, Brisbane. Chapter 4: The Work 117 Figure 4.13 Courtney Coombs On Show 2011 The second iteration followed only a few months after the first, and functions more as the resolved version of the ideas, and therefore the work. In this installation, the theatre cans have a ‘rug’ of cords placed in front of them, accentuating the materiality and theatricality of the work. Both iterations were installed in a space where the only two works were On Show and I found love on a cold and icy day in Copenhagen. Installed on the opposite wall, the installation work mirrors the symbol of the love heart produced by the theatre lights in the movie theatre in a simple, DIY manner. The lush, grand quality in the photographic image is not present in the installation, and the contrast between the works highlights the emptiness of the gallery wall lit by the theatre cans. The dialogue between the two works speaks to the grand gesture of romantic symbols and the clumsiness that is often at the core of their delivery as well as the potential emptiness in the structure of the institution of art. 118 Chapter 4: The Work Figure 4.14 Courtney Coombs On Show 2012 Image Credit: Joachim Froese As previously discussed, the [at times imperfect] love heart is a metaphor for the contradictory relationship I have with art and the modernist canon. I use metaphors in my work in order to be direct without being didactic. Metaphors are understood from a very young age, they are, “embedded in our culture, and we draw upon the conventional wisdom and symbols of our time” (Haste 1993, 37). And I have come to understand the value of metaphor as a device to show “how things work…how things should be valued, and how they relate to other things” (Haste 1993, 38). Metaphors generate a space for engagement: the possibilities for the play of language and image that metaphor evokes has become central to my practice, connecting with Helen Haste’s assertion that: Metaphors, in effect, provide schemas, models for explanation, and models for what things are connected and how the connections function. A metaphor transforms meaning. Common metaphors are shared; meaning is easily communicated through them, and the novel is easily made familiar. Metaphors help us to communicate familiar ideas; they help us to generate […] ideas, and facilitate their transmission. Chapter 4: The Work 119 Metaphors provide frameworks within which we are able to think, and to communicate (Haste 1993, 38). The love heart creates a shared familiarity and communication between the work, the viewer and myself. As a signifier of romantic ideals, the familiar symbol of the love heart in my work becomes ironically imperfect, misshapen and at times a little sad; reflecting my somewhat clumsy, yet honest, form of loving. Spillage Spillage (2012) is made up of thousands of rayon rose petals spilling out of a red plastic bin as if dropped or knocked over in some kind of unknown event, but its position in the gallery suggests it is a totally contrived arrangement. The ambiguity and sense of unease found in this arrangement, and therefore in the intention for the work is central to this work. Together with an exploration of humour, metaphor and irony, the work aims to deconstruct the institutional precepts such as ‘mastery,’ ‘autonomy,’ and the role of women’s subjectivity in art. 120 Chapter 4: The Work Figure 4.15 Courtney Coombs Spillage 2012 The thousand of petals strewn over the floor resemble the autumn leaves that fall and clump along the streets of Melbourne, the city of my childhood. At the time, I had been questioning the value of art, the ‘mastery’ of art making, the art market and the seemingly random selection of [mostly male] ‘great’ artists. As previously discussed, the work I was making was mostly in response to my own response to the canon, using strategies selected from more marginal art practices, such as feminist and queer approaches to making. By producing a work that was experience-based, conceptually playful and focussed on the indeterminate and ephemeral, I intended the work to operate in contrast to the structural forms of art such as technicality, time spent, and form. Extending on previously discussed work Spread (with Bob), I explored various outdoor, non-art-related activities that I had enjoyed in my childhood, like walking home from school in autumn, kicking the heaped leaves on the ground. Initially, I imagined bringing this experience into the gallery. However, combining this impulse with my research into the potential for using symbols of romantic love as a strategy of critique, I instead substituted red rayon rose petals for the leaves on the ground. The petals invite the viewer to imagine they are playing with the petals as they might with leaves in the park, or as they make their way through the streets. I originally intended for the work to be produced from real dried rose petals, to work more closely with the concept of the leaves, however the process of researching this as a material lead me to these cheap and tacky rayon rose petals. I could not comprehend how anyone would find them romantic! As a result I felt I needed to use Chapter 4: The Work 121 them, to play with their symbolic potential. By doing so, I sought to expose the cliché and artificiality of romantic love as it is promoted in popular culture, but their tawdriness also attracted me. The contradictory nature of this repulsion and attraction acts as a metaphor for the male modernist artists I engage with. I love to hate them, and love them, as much as I love to hate and love the art world. Reminiscent of Gonzalez-Torres’s spill works, this is one of a number of works I produced alongside this project that engage in dialogue with his practice. Rather than stemming from a faux-llaboration, the works that engage with the legacy of Gonzalez-Torres operate more in terms of a reverent homage. Spillage focuses on the absurdity of the fake rose petals that are usually purchased and used for ‘romantic’ events, but like the work of Gonzalez-Torres, also maintains an element of sadness and loss. The petals spilling out of a bin provoke the question of why the petals have been discarded. What occurred to result in them being spilled across the floor? There is something beautiful in this potential sadness. By taking these objects of romance and heaping them in the gallery, I draw attention to the limpness of the romantic symbol/ideal, while maintaining an element of sadness and loss. I wanted to evoke something beautiful in this potential sadness, something that might explore the complications of the human condition of love, longing and loss. As curator Laura Brown wrote when she curated the work into a small group exhibition that explored the ‘grand gesture’ in the tackiness of materials, “Coombs underlines the nauseating cliché of it all. But of course, in making ‘art’ in the first instance, and feeling it necessary to pay some kind of (mocking) homage to 122 Chapter 4: The Work its men, she is complicit in a way that we all are. The work both lambastes and offers a love letter to this male-dominated lineage” (Brown 2013). Black Spill (small) Following on from Spillage, Black Spill (small) (2014) was produced for the exhibition In Pursuit of Magic and, while it continues with some of the same ideas previously explored, it differs in colour and scale and arrangement. It utilised black rayon rose petals that were neatly piled in the corner of the gallery space, the petals seem to be purged out of a crack in the wall, or perhaps they have been swept waiting to be collected and thrown in the bin. Again, I came across these black rose petals on a wedding suppliers website and once again found it absurd that these tacky, fake, and quite ugly black rose petals might function as a symbol for love and romance for such an occasion. To me, the black rayon petals, apparently wilted and dead, contradicted the traditional gift of a rose, which is meant to symbolise love and fertility. Figure 4.16 Courtney Coombs Black Spill (small) 2014 Chapter 4: The Work 123 Black Spill (small), and Spillage [to a certain degree] can be contextualised through the practice and legacy of Gonzalez-Torres; they are a homage of sorts. Set in the corner of the gallery, taking up less room than Spillage, and using black rose petals, the work is somehow beautiful, intimate, and vulnerable. But there is also an element of humour in the sorrow, connecting with Barbara Kruger’s discussion of the link between laughter and sorrow: If you think there’s a long stretch of unoccupied emotion between laughter and sorrow, then think again. Because the two are linked in a messy tango of slippages, mixed messages and quadruple entendres. Demanding a commentary that vigilantly patrols the dicey terrain between vulnerability and megalomania, arrogance and abjection, the comedic is motored by its intimacy with objectification, by its ability to step outside of it all and still get under its own skin (Kruger 2007, 108). By using romantic symbols as ironic metaphors, in a way that incorporates my provisional approach to presentation, the work becomes a somewhat shyly intimate offering for the viewer. Grand Gestures Grand Gestures (2013) is a moving image work that was produced for an exhibition of the same name, curated by Laura Brown37. A compilation of short clips from fourteen movies, the work depicts a series of romantic grand gestures. In response to Brown’s title for the exhibition I starting thinking more critically about the romantic grand gesture in mainstream popular culture, and the role that these play in consolidating 37 the heteronormative structures that significantly constrain August 2013, The Hangar, Brisbane. 124 Chapter 4: The Work understandings about romance and love in our culture. As a single child of a single mother, I spent most Friday nights in the lounge room watching a rented video. From a very young age, these movies shaped much of my understanding of the world, and taught me about growing up, relationships [romantic and otherwise] and how to navigate the outdoor terrain; they gave me an unrealistic idea of how romantic relationships function. I understood romantic grand gestures as proof of love – however, I now recognise that these sorts of acts, in actuality, range from unhealthy expectations, to sexist representations of relationships to downright bullying and abusive behaviours. Figure 4.17 Courtney Coombs Grand Gestures 2013 Gender roles and expectations are ingrained from birth. As Simone de Beauvoir famously stated, “One is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, physiological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine” (de Beauvoir 1952, 249). This project has been as much about me unlearning the societal oppressions that were Chapter 4: The Work 125 placed on me since birth as they have been about anything else. As Monique Wittig argues, “…what makes a woman is a specific relation to a man, a relation that we have previously called servitude, a relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation” (Wittig 1992b, 20). Throughout this project I have been working towards unlearning my complicit involvement in codependent romantic [and other] relationships between men and women, in order to relearn who I might be as an artist and a researcher, without the influence of hegemonic masculine structures. The fourteen clips in Grand Gestures span 23 minutes and 25 seconds. The scenes at first seem over the top, grand, fun and romantic, but as time goes on and the gesture is repeated with different characters and different settings, darkness begins to shroud the ‘feel-good moments’. The repetition of the act makes the critique explicit without any other textual or visual component. The subtlety, the provisional nature of the work (a simple cut and paste of the clips) underlines how banal and pervasive the tropes of romantic love are in popular media. I hoped the viewer would identify with the moving images that are ubiquitously familiar38, and by spending time with the work, be able to unpack the absurdity of the symbolic language they are presented with. TEXT, LANGUAGE AND VOICE Text, language and voice as narrative devices and material form have consistently been prominent elements to this project, not only in the development and production 38 With scenes from Sixteen Candles (1984), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Jerry Maguire (1996) and The Notebook (2004) for example. 126 Chapter 4: The Work of text-based artworks, but also through the process of developing titles for works39. The development of my voice has been as important in the practical component of this project as it has been in the process of researching theory. It has been an extensive pursuit, embracing the notion that, “coming to voice is a central epistemological metaphor for…development” (Gannett 1992, 178 as cited in Mattuck Tarule 1996, 274). Voice is a key theme of feminist discussion, with women talking, “specifically about the power of speaking voice in their lives: about ‘speaking up,’ ‘speaking out,’ ‘being silenced,’ ‘really talking,’ ‘saying what you mean,’ ‘listening to be heard’” (Mattuck Tarule 1996, 275). While I have long moved on from learning how to speak up and out, I have often struggled to trust my experiences of the world, to say what I really mean, and to feel heard. I think I learned early on that in order to get anywhere as a woman I must speak up and out, but as I have never been taught to speak effectively, my authentic self was often left unheard. The work in the project is a direct response to my desire to communicate honestly and succinctly, aiming to say just enough to communicate what it is I need to communicate, while still allowing for dialogue with the viewer, for ambiguity and external narratives to enter the conversation. In the development of my understanding of the importance of voice to this project, Jill Mattuck Tarule (1996) has been integral. She notes: …voice is an integral component in the thinking process, in knowing. Out loud or silently, voice animates thinking, produces thought, and 39 In 2009, I developed a process of titling work that explores a title’s function not simply as an accompanying component of the work, but as an extension, or a material of the work itself. Chapter 4: The Work 127 enables the thinker to stabilize and expand her thought. But the monologue can get to be “a little too much…to handle.” There is a “need to bounce some ideas” around with others. It is not enough to speak to an empty car. What animates both voice and listening in “the space between us” (Josselson, 1992) is dialogue, and it is dialogue that helps to create and solidify thought (Mattuck Tarule 1996, 279). Learning to provide just enough space between my ideas and the work, and between the works and other works, and the works and the viewer has been integral to discovering my voice. As a result of this investigation into voice, I have increasingly produced text-based works. Referring at times to the legacy of the male dominated arena of conceptual art and drawing on the legacy of feminist conceptual practice that lives on the margins of art history, the text-based works aim to speak directly to the viewer. By using language and voice as a way to address the feelings that I have, I hope to evoke a connection and shared understanding in those engaging with the work. I use text as a way to draw attention to the frustrations I have as a woman, and a woman artist. In discussing women’s engagement with conceptual practice, Lucy Lippard states: Many of these artists chose themselves as their subject matter, a natural outcome of the previous isolation of women artists and of the general process of consciousness raising. Some chose an autobiographical method; many chose to concentrate on a self that was not outwardly apparent, a self that challenged or exposed the roles they had been playing (Lippard 1976, 476). 128 Chapter 4: The Work My text-based works often stem from an internal dialogue, translating and at times repeating information that I receive from the outside world. However, the work is not purely personal. Once I have worked through and finalised a particular text, deciding on a suitable material/backdrop, the text and therefore the work ceases to function as personal dialogue. It instead opens up to form a dialogue and/or dialogues with the viewer, other works in the space, and with the various structures I aim to disrupt through the language of critique, and this what is at the heart of the project. Speak Up Speak Up (2011) was produced for a one night exhibition40 and displayed in the alley and courtyard of Metro Arts Brisbane. In the time before I was invited to take part in the event, I had become interested in extending my previous text works into a more direct conversation with the audience, and the opportunity to install the work in a non-conventional exhibition space such as the alley and courtyard seemed like a good place to do this. Like many of the works, the initial conceptual starting point for the work I produced for this event stemmed directly from my life at that time. The text, “WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?” developed from a number of internal dialogues I was having as I negotiated the world. Growing out of this questioning and uncertainty, I wanted this work to shift the question of doubt through the tone of the text, and so inscribed it in red, upper case, bold text contrasted with hot-pink background. While the question initially seems somewhat passive, the resulting vinyl banner, in alarming colours and tied up high at the entrance to the exhibition with hot-pink rope, shifted the phrase from passivity to confrontation, and the viewer 40 The Fort Project, curated by Siobhan Nunan, September 2011. Chapter 4: The Work 129 encountered the words at a ‘loud volume’. Situated at the entranceway of the event, the question could not be ignored. Figure 4.18 Courtney Coombs Speak Up 2011 This work expressed how my personal experience became political. In creating a banner, reminiscent of a [feminist] protest rally, I used internal dialogue to generate a conversation with the viewer, asking a question that I suspected many could connect with: hence, the slight ambiguity of the text. Who was I ‘speaking’ to? I was asking this question of the universe, of the art world, of a society in which many still regard me as a second-rate citizen because of my gender, and the viewer. And I was hoping that, in turn, the viewer could associate with the passionate frustration that was exuding from this work. I used personal moments, feelings and responses as the catalyst for this work, but added the elements and strategies of a number of artists who produced work before me41 in order to extend the work to engage with more socially connected topics. 41 Including seminal text artist Lawrence Weiner and Steffan Bruggemann, a neo-conceptual contemporary artist who has adopted the strategies of the past for critiquing the art world now. 130 Chapter 4: The Work My own struggle and the struggle for women to find and/or own their voice can be related to the notion of phallogocentrism. As Rosi Braidotti states, phallogocentrism: is defined in terms of which refers to the fact that, in the West, thinking and being coincide in such a way as to make consciousness coextensive with subjectivity: this is the logocentric trend. It also refers, however, to the persistent habit of alluding to subjectivity, as to all other key attributes of the thinking subject, in terms of masculinity or abstract virility (phallocentrism). The sum of the two results in the unpronounceable but highly effective phallo-gocentrism. It posits the masculine as a self-regulating rational agency and the feminine “Other” as a site of disorder and devaluation (Braidotti 2011, 96). While the masculine voice creates meaning in our society, I wonder how women [and in particular, me] are to learn to own our thoughts and words when we are constantly being othered. This has been one of the central questions I have been trying to navigate over the course of this PhD. Harden Up Harden Up (2011) was produced for Straight and Narrow42, a group exhibition with LEVEL co-directors Alice Lang and Rachael Haynes; the gallery was located in a building that had housed the local police station and lock-up from 1861-1982. Site is an important concern in my practice, and I was interested in engaging in some way with this gallery in terms of the history of the building. I was also working through multiple thought processes in relation to being a woman, an artist, a feminist artist 42 July 2011, John Paynter Gallery, Newcastle Chapter 4: The Work 131 and exhibiting work in the public realm. My process of working through these ideas directed me to thinking of the women in the police station’s history, those who would have spent time in the cells of the lock-up, and in the brown-leather padded cell that adjoined these spaces. I was, as can be seen in the discussion of Speak Up, very much concerned with finding my place as an artist and an academic amongst the quicksand of gender inequity; I was in need of a motto to get me through. One of the key Australian, masculine mottos seemed appropriate; I needed to “HARDEN THE FUCK UP”. Figure 4.19 Courtney Coombs Harden Up 2011 Printed in black vinyl lettering, the font references the work produced in the 1960s by iconic male conceptual artists such as Lawrence Weiner. In presenting the work in reference to this legacy, the work was an offering, a reminder to myself, and perhaps a reminder from the male dominated legacy I was working with. Once presented in public, however, the work took on new meaning. Like Speak Up, Harden Up had an ambiguous intended audience. Was the text speaking to me, the artist, or was it 132 Chapter 4: The Work speaking out to the viewer, and if so, why was I ‘shouting’ at them to harden the fuck up? Similarly to Speak Up (2011), Harden Up was developed from both personal experiences and conflict, in dialogue with the masculine canons of art. It was also a response to the site of art, and once placed before the public in the context of a police station and lock-up turned gallery space, it developed new meaning/s, addressing the viewer as well as myself, blurring the distinction between speaker and those being spoken to. Stay Soft Stay Soft was produced after and in conversation with Harden Up. Produced for my solo exhibition The sum of all things?43, the work explored the conflicting messages that women receive. “Harden up” and “stay soft” have been two pieces of advice I have received on more than once occasion in my lifetime, and I understand them to be common. I have found that women are often told to “stay soft” in varying situations in their life, via the media, as well by many close to them, however, when they are getting ‘overly emotional,’ or perhaps not fully coping with a given situation, they are advised to become more like a ‘man’ and ‘harden up,’ ensuring that they are aware that public and/or outward emotion is not the valued response in our society. In this work, therefore, I asked: What do these contradictory messages impart to those who receive them? Why are they gendered? And, how are we to know how to be in the world when we are expected to be both hard and soft? 43 2012. Held at Queensland University of Technology. Chapter 4: The Work 133 Figure 4.20 Courtney Coombs Stay Soft 2012 Image Credit: Joachim Froese As the formulaic black vinyl ‘art’ text that instructs the viewer to “HARDEN THE FUCK UP” reinforces the message of the text, the material chosen for Stay Soft also aims to reflect the meaning of the text. Each letter is an individual helium balloon, connected to the ground with ribbon and weights. Inflated and perky at the beginning of the exhibition, over the course of the following four weeks the balloons slowly deflated, resulting in the advice becoming pathetic and unable to stand the test of time. The work explores the notion of staying soft, visually and metaphorically proposing that staying soft may also result in deflation, disappearing, and eventually becoming unseen. These two works again represent the humour and pathos that is generated through the process of uncomfortable reflexivity, the messy and often contradictory process of finding my place in the world. Love/Fear Fear love, love fear: these were the words that were cycling through my mind at the 134 Chapter 4: The Work time of production of this work. Produced for the exhibition In Pursuit of Magic44, this vinyl text work was the last conceptual development in the collection of four works that made up the exhibition. Evolving from my interest in presenting combinations of gestural works in order to develop and communicate an abstract narrative, through this work I aimed to deliver a direct engagement with the viewer, in a way that I have found text only permits; a literal dialogue. Figure 4.21 Courtney Coombs Love/Fear 2014 Image Credit: Christo Crocker Originally, the text was going to simply read, “Fear”, to set the context for the other three works in the exhibition. However, upon consideration of how the individual works formed a whole, it became clear to me that basing the exhibition in a single emotion would not reflect the binaries at play throughout the project. Therefore, I decided the combination of word “Love” with “Fear” would provide a broader basis for contextualisation and provide a bigger scope for the viewer to interact with the works. I used to understand fear as the opposite of love, however through my 44 April 2014, Bus Projects, Melbourne. Chapter 4: The Work 135 research into love in all its forms, I have come to comprehend fear as an inherent part of love, not its opposite. As a result, I was interested in this dialogue, the contradictions and the positions of those on either side. Installed in the top right corner of an industrial style gallery space, the works, in their bold black vinyl presence, seem to hover in their corner, at times obstructed from view as if they are hiding; or, they could be revealing themselves. Depending on the angle at which the viewer is looking at the work, or their particular mental state at the time, the text either reads “LOVE FEAR,” or “FEAR LOVE”, or in my case, both, repeatedly. The work borrows from the legacy of conceptual, and particularly male modernist art, but rather than purely referencing the work of the 1960s and 1970s through purely formal means, the work aims to use text to engage directly with the emotions of the viewer. It also provides a contextual tool for the other works in the space that speak to a similar thematic (love and fear), via different visual legacies and modes. The work critiques the male legacy of text-based art by inserting the personal directly into the gallery, and the minds of those who view the work. IT’S COMPLICATED: THE FINAL EXHIBITION The final creative output for this project was It’s Complicated45, an exhibition that incorporated each of the previously discussed elements of the research outputs of this research: faux-llaboration: the use of romantic love as an ironic metaphor for critique of the [male] modernist canon: and the final iteration of my investigation into text, language and voice. The works came together to form the final exploration into my gendered response to the modernist canon of art and the exhibition acts as a kind of 45 December 2014, Boxcopy Contemporary Art Space, Brisbane. 136 Chapter 4: The Work ‘full stop’ for this research project. The works in this exhibition demonstrate, through a plurality of critical approaches and creative forms, how the research undertaken can develop new understandings for developing feminist positions in relation to the modernist canon, and the gender inequities that continue to operate within the art world. It is a response to these systems in my own voice: a voice that has developed over the course of this PhD. It’s Complicated It’s Complicated (2014) was produced for the exhibition with the same name, forming the conceptual and visual anchor point for the other works in the gallery, much in the same way as the previously discussed Love/Fear work did. This work is an extension of a series of Breakup Cards (2014) I produced in response to a previous exhibition’s curatorial brief that asked the artists involve in the exhibition to make work that was not funny. Presented in an ornate funeral parlour [how could the work not be funny!?], the cards operated as farewells, with text that read: “It’s Over”; “It’s time to move on”; “All the best”; “We’re better apart”; and “I’m sorry.” It’s Complicated extends this experimentation with the form of the gift card, something traditionally given as a gesture of support, to communicate with and offer truths to the viewer. The work combines two elements; a card, supported by a commercial table number or menu holder, that reads “I love you,” and a cheap LED sign resting on the floor, face up, subtly flashing the words “It’s Complicated”. Chapter 4: The Work 137 Figure 4.22 Courtney Coombs It’s Complicated 2014 Image Credit: Sam Cranstoun The text combines the ubiquitous expression, “I love you,” with a phrase now most commonly associated with a Facebook relationship status: “It’s Complicated.” Placed together in the context of this research project, and the exhibition, however these phrases reference a broader experience of relationships, romantic and otherwise, including relationships with the world more broadly, society, power structures, and the art world. The statements are simultaneously literal and metaphorical and it is this in-between space of the real and imaginary in text and language that I find beautiful. As Robert Smithson (1967) states, “language operates between literal and metaphorical signification. The power of a word lies in the very inadequacy of the context it is placed, in the unresolved or partially resolved tension of disparates.” The two objects operate in dialogue with each other [they are a pair, a couple] and also with the other works in the exhibition, with the gallery they are installed in, with the structure of art, and society more broadly; they are in no way autonomous objects. When producing the work I imagined that “I love you” stemmed directly from me in my voice, while “It’s complicated” replied in the voice of art and its history, yet upon seeing it installed in the gallery, the context for the 138 Chapter 4: The Work work broadened significantly. Rather than speaking only from my subjective position in the context of my research, the work expanded, representing many and varied relationships, romantic and otherwise. Like each of the works in this exhibition, the text, in combination with the materials [a home-made card and a cheap, generic version of a LED sign] represents an intimate and vulnerable offering to the gallery, and to the viewer. As previously stated, the act of becoming openly vulnerable has been an important development over the course of this PhD. The majority of my earlier works, while they stemmed from personal and vulnerable personal experiences, attempted to cover this vulnerability; the Minimalist form afforded this well. However, through the process of engaging with and unpacking the inequities that women are faced with, as well as the various strategies that women have undertaken in responding to and disrupting these structures, I have found the confidence to identify and own my position in this ongoing conversation. The result of this confidence is the development of the ability to form and communicate an intimate and vulnerable relationship with the work. With Bob and Lynda With Bob and Lynda (2014) functions as the metaphorical ‘full stop’ of the PhD. It marks the end of this PhD and is the final nod to two artists who have greatly influenced my work over the last six years: Robert Morris and Lynda Benglis. While it is a homage of sorts to both of these artists, the work functions as my first fauxllaboration with a female artist. As I was initially developing the concept for the work, I intended the image to be a replica of Benglis’ Artforum ad, Advertisement in: Artforum, November 1974, Vol.13, No.3, S. 3-4, discussed earlier in this document. Chapter 4: The Work 139 However, in reviewing the photographs in which I had attempted a similar stance and attitude, I found that I was merely sexualising my image, and could not mimic the androgyny and power of Benglis’ pose. At one level this was due to a our different body shapes, but I also had to consider the different motivations and contexts for producing such an image for display. As discussed in Chapter 1, Benglis was directly responding to the new [at the time] trend of male artists using themselves, and particularly their masculinity, as promotional material for their exhibitions rather than their works; she was joining them in their game of ‘bigness’. While this image appeals to me visually, and reminds me that many of the inequities and attitudes from the 1970s remain today, my work was also tipping my hat to the courageousness of her full frontal assault on the masculine egos parading across the institutions of the art world. In the conversation I was having with her I wanted to thank her for her work and forthright intelligence, and for giving me permission to turn my own vulnerability into a strength in my work. Figure 4.23 Courtney Coombs With Bob and Lynda 2014 140 Chapter 4: The Work The image I selected for the work was from the outtakes, images that were taken in between my attempts to recreate a strong and empowered pose; when this picture was taken I was trying to loosen up by making silly gestures with my body. After reviewing hundreds of images taken over two sessions, this one immediately stood out as the right image. It was me; it was my image, speaking in my voice. It visually summed up the critical and creative research explored over the course of the project. The work is not simply a re-staging of Benglis’ defiant gesture, but rather a contribution to the dialogue between Benglis and Morris about the politics and poetics of the body, language and materials. In this self-portrait, wearing a black strap-on harness and dildo, the body is somewhat blurred, caught mid-action in what appears to be a gyrating movement. By not looking directly to the camera my body appears to be gesturing to something out of the frame. Cropped sections of Benglis’ and Morris’ advertisements are placed in the bottom left corner of the image, directly in my sightline, connecting my orientation to a partial glimpse of their iconic works. The work nods [or gyrates] to the legacies and canons of art, while also presenting a humorous ‘fuck you’ to the art world in general, to prescriptive gender roles, to heteronormativity, and to all other patriarchal systems that continue to dominate society. Revolve/Spun Revolve/Spun (2014) is a point-of-view video of the image and sound of spinning 360 degrees on a rocky surface in an Australian bush setting. This work began its development on a research trip to Turkey while driving from Antalya to Kas along a narrow road that was snaking along the coastal route with dry mountains cliffs on Chapter 4: The Work 141 one side, and a drop to the ocean on the other. Sitting in the back seat of the car, with Turkish radio filling the air, the pleasantly dreamy experience felt like yet another metaphor for romantic relationships and the art world; intimate and distant, exotic yet familiar. I shot video of the journey on my phone, with the intention of using the ‘road movie’ to act as an ironic metaphor for these experiences. However, on reviewing the footage it didn’t capture the feelings and thoughts I experienced on the trip. The landscape was beautiful, but I didn’t connect with it in the way I did that day, it felt foreign. This recognition of the differences and connections between experiencing familiar and unfamiliar spaces became the focus of the work, and from the experience of driving along the twisting, winding roads in Turkey I thought about the kind of disorientation that comes from the act of turning around in circles: about playing as a child in the bush landscape, and how spinning round in circles could be another metaphor for attempting to find a place in the art world, while also referencing the ‘giddiness’ that is associated with falling in [or out of] love. I have spent a lot of time on mountains and in the bush over my lifetime, thinking through problems and connecting with the environment. My connection to these landscapes is not easily explained, but it probably stems at least partially from a yearning or nostalgia for simple pleasures, for the bodily joy of playing. 142 Chapter 4: The Work Figure 4.24 Courtney Coombs Revolve/Spun 2014 Image Credit: Christo Crocker I shot the footage with camera in hand, the camera becoming an extension of my body, as I spun around in circles. As I was spinning I began to lose my vision, lose my sense of balance, and experience nausea while attempting to stay upright; at this point the camera captured more than I could see. I looped the footage so it would appear to be spinning indefinitely with the image weaving its way up and down as well as around and around, causing the trees to meld into one another in a strobe-like effect. I wanted to take the serene experience of being immersed in the bush landscape and transform it into one that creates a feeling of motion sickness by literally spinning endlessly around in circles. The work embodies the process of being open to discovering something stable in the midst of swirling chaos, as well as the vulnerability that this openness creates. This PhD project has resulted many times in the feeling I am ‘chasing my tail’, both in my ongoing quest to analyse gender inequality, and in the production of works that repeatedly address a similar narrative. In this work, I own this position as a representation of the discomfort of it all. The work is not necessarily a critique of this Chapter 4: The Work 143 positions but rather an insight into this feeling. It is an open offering to the viewer. Inspired by feminist performance and video work, particularly Linda Benglis’ video works, I manifest what Greenberg describes as being “drawn to the unselective recording of the actual as it happens, free of aesthetics” (Greenberg in Gautherot et al. 2009, 53). The View The View (2014) is a large-scale vinyl text that reads, “The view is better from the sidelines.” The work, writ large, represents one of the key findings of this research project: that paradox and uncertainty are central to creative practice and research. It embodies the tension between desiring to be in the centre [as a successful young artist], and questioning and critiquing the very structures that made the centre so desirable in the first place. I concluded that one could only really see the destructive nature of ideas, desires, ambitions and relationships once you are no longer in the ‘eye of the storm’. The text operates as an affirmation for embracing otherness, for understanding that it is only when we are outside of something that we can truly see it in operation and know our preferred position, and for me the sidelines are a place of critical reflection. 144 Chapter 4: The Work Figure 4.25 Courtney Coombs The View 2014 Image Credit: Sam Cranstoun Rather than using the standard art font of my previous vinyl text works, The View has been designed and cut from my handwritten text. While this work fits comfortably in line with my previous explorations into text, language and voice, as with the other three works in this exhibition, The View involves a return to my own hand, and to my own voice. Time spent engaging with the modernist canon and other artists who have responded to it has allowed me to better understand both the terrain and my own position, and subsequently my voice. This work is a statement of that understanding of this terrain, and my desired position in relation to it. I do not aim to discard the legacies of modern art, but my view of them has been forever altered in the process of understanding, disrupting, and renegotiating. The four works in this exhibition summarise this research project, from the initial realisation that my identity did not fit neatly into the lineage of the modernist canon (It’s Complicated), to my direct engagement with the legacies that I was grappling with in the form of faux-llaborations (With Bob and Lynda), to the use of romantic Chapter 4: The Work 145 love as an ironic metaphor for critiquing the structures of the art world and society more broadly (Revolve/Spun), to my understanding of the terrain and subsequent development and insertion of my own strongly feminist voice (The View). As works “they do not seek a comfortable, transcendent end-point” (Pillow 2013, 188), they are part of a series of propositions that are habitually recreated or reconsidered at any given time according to how the ideas, materials, objects, contexts and vicissitudes of my life converge. They celebrate the dialogical imagination, the ephemerality of things, openness to new discoveries and the messiness of life, but most importantly my voice. By developing original approaches to making visual art, such as fauxllaboration and the use of romantic love as an ironic metaphor for critiquing the structures of patriarchy, the ambitions of this project will extend far beyond this project’s scope. They will continue to open up new possibilities for understanding how contemporary feminist art practices can critique and dissipate patriarchal culture more broadly. 146 Chapter 4: The Work Chapter 5: Conclusion I commenced this project with a desire to unpack the role that feminisms played for me as an early career female artist, who identified as a feminist. It has taken a large portion of the last six years of this project to even begin to understand the various implications of my particular approach to research, which includes my practice-based and feminist methodologies. Utilising these methodologies led me to question the power structures at play within the institutions of art and the academy through strategies of voice, dialogue, exchange and narrative in the creative research. This practice-based approach developed rigorous critical engagements with other art practices and ideas addressing my own research, which in turn contextualise and substantiate the creative outcomes of the project overall. This exegesis has delivered an overarching view of the research project. In Chapter 2 I presented the design of the project as being premised on the idea of the tentative gesture. I discussed this practice-based approach that emphasises uncomfortable reflexivity as the process for making and reflecting on the work, the role of collaboration as an increasingly vital element for extending the possibilities of individual practice through dialogue, exchange and narrative, and finally, my utilisation of humour as a particular method of ironic deconstruction for critiquing the heteronormative, patriarchal structures of art. These practical modes of creative research have been mapped across particular constructs of feminisms that define the approach to making work and discussing the paradoxical relationship between reverence and critique in the analysis of the history of art from my position as an early career female artist. Chapter 5: Conclusion 147 In Chapter 3 I introduced the various historical and theoretical contexts for the creative outputs, my theoretical research and my political position, each of which informs all aspects of my life. I established the situation of gender inequality that permeates the art world by presenting statistics and arguments regarding the achievements of men and women in the visual arts. I provided case studies of Minimalist and Postminimalist art practices and a selection of women artists who have creatively and critically engaged in a dialogue with these practices through their own work. I also clarified how the related themes of love, loss and narrative that are central to this project have developed a unique voice through critically reflecting on and extending certain aspects of the formal, material, and conceptual strategies used by the artists Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Sophie Calle. In Chapter 4 I examined a selection of the creative works that have been produced for this research project and illuminated three distinctive strategies developed through the research process that represent its original contribution to new knowledge in contemporary visual art. These are: employing faux-llaboration, and romantic love as ironic metaphor for deconstructing the modernist canon, and realising these conceptual and material tropes through the methodological process of the tentative gesture. I described this approach as deliberately evasive, refusing to point to a finite reading; I do not want the work to be trapped by overly defining constructs and it is fleeting, generative, and open precisely for this reason. The seemingly ‘unresolved’ nature of the work offers possibilities for fictive tangents and an open space in which viewers can fill in the blanks and construct their own narratives. To outline how the tentative gesture operates in the research project I presented a number of creative outcomes for discussion and defined this as an 148 Chapter 5: Conclusion ongoing feminist strategy for my work, in which I produce provisional proposals intended to create a series of open dialogues—between myself and the works, the works with each other, the works and the viewer and as a result, myself and the viewer. I also discussed the final exhibition, It’s Complicated, which formed the metaphorical full stop for this particular research project. The exhibition incorporated each of the above mentioned strategies in order to develop and produce an exhibition that highlighted a feminist response to the modernist canon, in a voice that is all mine: open, intimate and vulnerable. By collaborating with others, developing and enacting the various faux-llaborative relationships, exploring text, language and voice while reconfiguring and recontextualising found objects, I have begun to feel comfortable and confident in my position as a young, Brisbane-based female artist. I am [still] grappling with the heteronormative, patriarchal structures of the art world and society more broadly, and while I don’t have a means to breakdown these structures, I have confidence in my knowledge of the landscape, and therefore in my position, on the sidelines. The creative outputs of this PhD are affirming of this position. The practice is strong, yet sensitive, critical without being polemical, and upfront but ambiguous enough to allow space for additional narratives to grow around it. In this research project, I have explored romantic symbols as ironic metaphors through a variety of media, more often than not through a selection of reconfigured found objects. I have selected found objects based on a level of intimacy that I, and prospective viewers, might share with them. By transforming mundane, commercial objects like taps, plugs, tents, and festive decorations into art objects, I aim to deliver Chapter 5: Conclusion 149 my own particular form of pathos as a playful, poetic engagement with the world and as a strategy for critiquing it. The contribution to knowledge can be found predominantly in the body of creative work that has been created over the period of this PhD46. In this work, there are a number of approaches that I have identified and developed over the course of this project and my analysis of these within the practice of art is a transferable body of knowledge. While much contemporary art responds to [directly and/or indirectly] the history of art, I have developed an approach to making that embraces a tentative gesture as the final work of art in order to critique the stubbornly gendered ‘mastery’ of art production, an expectation that harks back to the patriarchal structures that still exist in the contemporary art world today. The works produced directly responds to the [male] modernist canon and contribute to both the legacy and the ongoing dialogue of feminist art. The development and insertion of my voice, both in the creative outputs and this accompanying exegesis, also contributes to ongoing discussions about feminist engagement with the phallogocentric construction of language. My voice has developed inside the heteronormative, patriarchal structures of the art world, academia and the world more broadly, but it has also developed from the conscious effort to reflect on and break down a series of constructions of language [visual, aural and written] in order to express a perspective that is uniquely mine. I have come to terms with the fact that I cannot ever truly exist outside of the structure/s that bind us all, but I have resolved to do so with open eyes and an ongoing critique. 46 See accompanying book of images for full scope. 150 Chapter 5: Conclusion This project has taken many turns along the way, with the practice leading the direction of the theoretical research. I do not view this research project as ‘finished’ but believe, rather, that it has come to the point where I am now equipped with the knowledge and the skills to continue as a researcher and artist engaging with the [predominantly male] modernist canon of art. 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