Running-room in the mangle of practice : contemporary art in the thick of things : a thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

Abstract

This document and the exhibited artwork it accompanies aims to perform a positive aesthetic of exile that enacts the dislocating and shattering strategies of spatial, temporal and imagistic montage but also attempts to open a caesura in today’s relentless flow of images and thickening temporality. It joins with particular currents in engaged contemporary art to re-imagine what documentary form might be as an act of revelation not reduction. I have advocated in word and deed a structure of desire that is promiscuous without being possessive and accounts for a mode of subjectivity that temporally emerges from its material conditions in the thick of things. The corpus of experimental work has traversed a wide range of media and intentions but always with these issues in mind. I have produced small, tentative gestures in the city and ambitious proposals for affective maps in a mixed-media installation. I have gathered together an ambitious chorus of voices from across disciplines to share in common in a dialectical movement of resistance and accommodation that seeks to expand the realms of conceptual and corporeal possibility.