Overview
Project status: In progress
This research project will critically examine and creatively explore how contemporary visual art practices contribute to the politics of aesthetics as outlined by the philosopher and theorist Jacques Ranciere.
Ranciere's proposes that the complex relations between politics and aesthetics established since modernity have resulted in what he terms the 'Aesthetic Regime of Art'. This involves a new way of considering art as an emancipatory process, one that creates a new set of complications and potential contradictions for understanding the relationships between politics and art.
The project will explore Ranciere's theoretical claims through a critical examination of his writing, a sustained investigation of art practices that actively engage with the political and my own practice-based research. Through this investigation the project aims to clearly identify how artists work across differing discursive regimes, using creative strategies ranging from humour to poetics to initiate new and unexpected ways for understanding art and its relation to the political, to non-art, and most importantly the politics of the everyday.
- Research leader
- Organisational unit
- Lead unit Creative Industries Faculty
- Start date
- 1st January 2009
- End date
- 1st January 2013
- Research area
- Innovation in the performing and digital arts
Mr Mark WebbDetails
Project description
As primarily a practice-based research project it will consist of 60% creative work and accompanying exegetical component of 40% that will act to critically contextualise, analyse and reflect on the creative outcomes. These creative works are developed across both traditional and digital media, and often rely on the context of their exhibition for their conceptual and formal evolution. In this regard they aim to engage with the political and aesthetic dimensions of traditional and institutional spaces of exhibition, as well as non-traditional sites in private and public spaces.
Creative Industries linkage
This project will provide original research in both creative practice and critical thinking around the relationships between contemporary art and politics. It will produce new and original artworks that allow new understandings for audiences on how art can actively engage in the political processes of the everyday.
Publications and output
The project will involve producing a significant body of artworks that address the main concerns of the research and an exegetical component that contextualises the theoretical research and creative practice. I will be participating in a number of ongoing exhibitions both nationally and internationally over the course of the project, present papers on the findings, and the final exhibition of artworks will be at both QUT Art Museum and the Block in the Creative Industries Precincts at QUT.
