KATE WOODCROFT

Bachelor of Creative Industries (Visual Arts) (Honours)

Catherine or Kate: The Tertiary Spaces of Collaboration, Performance and Humour in Contemporary Art

2012

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of

Master of Arts (Research)

School of Visual Arts // Faculty of Creative Industries // Queensland University of Technology

ii

Dialogue, Performance, Collaboration, Play, Conceptual Art, Humour, Gilbert and

George, Third Hand.

Key Words

iii

The traditional model of visual arts practice is one that privileges highly individuated and

predominantly material investigations and outcomes. This approach overlooks and

devalues the formal and informal dialogues and collaborations that take place in the

process of making art. This Masters research project considers how the experience of

working in collaboration can generate a new model for thinking about practice-led

methodologies in visual arts. It aims to do this by mapping out and elaborating on the

processes and approaches to making that fellow Masters student Catherine Sagin and I

have come to use in our alliance as ‘Fiona Mail’, ‘Catherine Sagin’ and ‘Catherine or

Kate’ respectively. The fluidity of our collaborative moniker is one example of the way

this project creatively explores and re-assesses the implications of collaboration.

Drawing upon the contextual frames of conceptual art, performance art, and comedy

this research looks at the significance of and possibilities for working as a collaborative

duo.

Abstract

iv

Key Words .................................................................................................................................ii

Abstract .................................................................................................................................... iii

Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................iv

List of Figures ............................................................................................................................ v

Statement of Authorship ............................................................................................................vi

Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................. vii

Preface ...................................................................................................................................... 1

Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 4

Chapter 1: Methodology – Collaboration, Authorship, Art in the Discursive Field ....................... 6

Chapter 2: Contextual Review ................................................................................................... 9

2.1 Conceptual Art .............................................................................................................. 9

2.2 Tertiary Performance and Documentation ................................................................... 11

2.2.1 Tertiary Performance ....................................................................................... 11

2.2.2 Documentation ................................................................................................ 12

2.3 Gilbert and George ..................................................................................................... 14

2.4 Emergent Concerns: Humour & Gender ..................................................................... 17

Chapter 3: Analysis of Work .................................................................................................... 19

3.1 I’ll be honest with you ok. I just need a body next to me. That’s all I need, you

need it as much as I do (2009) .......................................................................................... 19

3.2 We are always trying not to repeat ourselves (2009) ................................................... 21

3.3 Duel (2010) ................................................................................................................. 23

3.4 Mazda 121 Residency (2010) ..................................................................................... 25

3.5 I’m the kind of person you should choose to have with you (2010) ............................. 27

3.6 Networking (2011)....................................................................................................... 29

3.7 Capper (2011) ............................................................................................................. 31

3.8 Survey (2011) .............................................................................................................. 33

3.9 Gorillas in the Mist (2011) ............................................................................................ 34

Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 36

Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 37

Supplementary Creative Work ................................................................................................. 42

Table of Contents

v

Figure 1: Installation View of ‘Bricks’ (2008) .......................................................................... 1

Figure 2: Installation View of ‘Try Me’ (2008) ......................................................................... 1

Figure 3: Installation View of ‘You don’t win friends with salad’ (2008) .................................. 2

Figure 4: Gilbert and George ‘The Singing Sculpture’ (1969) .............................................. 14

Figure 5: Gilbert and George ‘George the Cunt and Gilbert the Shit’ A Magazine

Sculpture (1969) ................................................................................................................. 16

Figure 6: Performance Documentation of ‘I’ll be honest with you ok. I just need a body

next to me. That’s all I need, you need it as much as I do’ (2009) ...................................... 19

Figure 7: Video Stills from ‘We are always trying to repeat ourselves’ (2009) ...................... 21

Figure 8: Screenshot depicting video response to Harrison and Wood Tateshots

Interview ............................................................................................................................. 22

Figure 9: Performance Documentation of ‘Duel’ (2010) ...................................................... 23

Figure 10: Video Stills from ‘Mazda 121 Residency’ 2010 .................................................. 25

Figure 11: Installation View of ‘I’m the kind of person you should choose to have with

you’ (2010) ......................................................................................................................... 27

Figure 12: Video stills from ‘I’m the kind of person you should choose to have with you’

(2010) ................................................................................................................................. 27

Figure 13: Installation View of ‘Networking’ (2011) .............................................................. 29

Figure 14: Warrick Capper Website (2011) ......................................................................... 31

Figure 15: Warwick Capper with artist Damiano Bertoli at the opening of IMA at Surfers.

(2011) ................................................................................................................................. 31

Figure 16: Excerpt from photographic series; installation views of ‘Survey’ (2011) .............. 33

Figure 17: Installation view of ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ (2011) ................................................... 34

Figure 18: Video still from ‘Gorillas in the Mist’ 2011 ........................................................... 35

List of Figures

vi

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet the

requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the best

of my knowledge and belief, this thesis contains no material previously published or

written by another person, except where due reference is made.

Signature:

Date:

Statement of Authorship

vii

To Catherine, for being uncompromising, and for being the tortoise to my hare (!).

To Mark Webb, for being an artist’s artist.

To Joe, for endless jests.

To my family, for all manner of support.

I love you all.

Thanks also to my assessors and to everyone who has contributed to the dialectic of

this research over the last three years.

Acknowledgements

1

During my Honours year I initiated a collaborative venture with fellow student Catherine Sagin.

This collaboration has since grown steadily into the most dominant, challenging and rewarding

component of my extended practice (across art-making, writing and running an Artist-run

initiative). By the end of the first year of the Masters the main focus of the research had shifted

from an individual inquiry into a primarily collaborative one.

The individual research that I undertook in my Honours year and the early stages of the Masters

looked into the potential of ‘play’ as a method which with to deconstruct and generate

questions around the instrumentality often apparent in the ways we negotiate physical space.

These concerns manifested in performances, participatory installations, video works and

photographs that used the body as a primary material.

Fig. 1: Installation View of ‘Bricks’ (2008)

Fig. 2: Installation View of Try Me (2008)

Preface

2

Fig. 3: Installation View of You don’t win friends with salad (2008)

These works are early examples of my interest in the body as a material and also in the social

spaces that art can occupy and produce. They also demonstrate the importance of play as a

central ethic in the methodology and outcomes of the creative practice. These concerns have

all remained integral to the collaborative project and I go on to discuss them in the remainder of

the exegesis.

My inclination toward collaboration and dialogue has been inherent in the various activities I

have undertaken since beginning my study in the Visual Arts. The dialogues developed with my

teachers and peers during undergraduate and post-graduate study have enabled me to reflect

on and articulate the concerns now intrinsic to my work. These dialogues remain an invaluable

resource in my ongoing practice.

In 2008, I collaborated with my peers Catherine Sagin, Courtney Coombs and Antoinette J.

Citizen to form No Frills*, an Artist-run gallery project. The group exhibitions held at the early

stages of the No Frills* project (No Frills*- blkmrkt Gallery, Lean Toward Indifference! - Metro

Arts Galleries, No Frills* vs. The General Will with collaborative group The General Will and more

recently, Eastern Seaboard - Artspace Visual Art Centre, Sydney) have been especially

important in developing a local contextual frame for my own thinking about the collaborative

process. These shows were concerned with and consistently referred to dialogue and humour

3

as vital strategies with which to contend with contemporary art practice and exhibition. These

experiences helped me to appreciate how the practice is predominantly focused on

performative and dialogical methods of working and how these methods are transferred into

the work that we produce. These experiences have also led to numerous collaborations with

other peers across art practice, critical writing and curatorial work and have firmly established

the significance of collaboration as an exemplary method and approach to research as

practice.

4

The creative outcomes (70%) of this Masters thesis are the result of my long-term collaboration

with Catherine Sagin. This exegesis addresses the implications of working in collaboration and

the ways in which our creative work prospects this terrain. The project is sub-titled: The

Tertiary Spaces of Collaboration, Performance and Humour in Contemporary Art. This is in part

an indication of the importance of Charles Green’s notion of the ‘third hand’, “a third artistic

identity superimposed over and exceeding the individual artists”1 which will be discussed in

broader detail in Chapter One. It also stresses the significance of the specific social, creative

and theoretical spaces that have been generated as a result of the collaboration and the

artwork that we have produced together. I will discuss how, for me, collaboration, humour and

performance are hugely effective strategies for generating tertiary or in-between spaces that

help to position the practice outside of conventional and habitual modes of thinking about and

making art. I also believe that these strategies strengthen the capacity of the practice to explore

the latent complexity of intersubjective experience.

The first chapter describes the methodology for this project. It looks at how the experience of

working in collaboration generates the practice-led model of research that Catherine and I have

come to use in our alliance under the names 'Fiona Mail', 'Catherine Sagin' and finally

‘Catherine or Kate’. This discussion foregrounds the methodology as a material in the practice;

as such it is subject to the investigative processes we undertake together in making work.

The second chapter describes the some of the more prominent ideas that have informed my

research. I touch on the importance of conceptual art in opening up the discursive and

contextual possibilities of art and also its significance as a precedent for the literalness apparent

in our creative processes. This chapter also looks at the oblique position of collaborators Gilbert

and George in relation to conceptual practices and argues that this position is maintained

through the ambiguity of their public personas. I also discuss the recent emergence of humour

and gender as substantial concerns for the practice.

The third chapter aims to map out, reflect on and analyse the collaborative creative outcomes

of the project from my own perspective. It will give an account of my outlook on the dialogical

and performative approaches we have developed together. This discussion discusses creative

work from the two major exhibitions held as major creative outcomes for the Masters and also

a number of smaller projects that were produced early on and how these have contributed to

our current position in the practice.

1 Green, C. (2001) The Third Hand: Collaboration from Conceptualism to Post-Modernism, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. p.179.

Introduction

5

I conclude by affirming this project as the inauguration of a much larger venture that is capable

of contributing to research on the specific processes and implications inherent in collaborative

practices in the visual arts.

6

I understand the methodology of this project and for my previous research as something that

has been formed by the idiosyncratic processes that I undertake as a researcher. It is the result

of a long-term and ongoing reflection on my own creative practice and the work I have

undertaken with Catherine. The trajectory of our research is constituted by both independent

and collaborative activities and draws upon material from a broad range of popular, academic,

and everyday contexts. In a discussion of artistic research Mark Webb suggests to, “(…) take a

lead from Deleuze’s concept of the ‘tool box’ of philosophy, (…) to be ‘pragmatic’ in using the

potential of concepts at hand, not to be constrained by authority and legitimization but to ‘pry

open the vacant-spaces that enable you to build your life.’”2 He argues for the inevitability our

own distinctive positions within our research as artists and also the usefulness of this

uninhibited approach as we construct a space for the practice. The concepts that have been

brought to bear in the text that follows reflect this ‘makeshift’ approach to discussing the

practice.

Similarly, in a discussion of Practice-led Research (the principle academic framework for this

research) Brad Haseman suggests that “creative practitioners can turn to the methods of their

practice and re-purpose them to create an arsenal of research methods which serve their

research needs.”3 As such the methodology is always in the process of being revealed and

constructed through the various activites that Catherine and I undertake; it is “processural,

performative and emergent”4. This is an approach to making that we both very strongly identify

with and will be a recurring emphasis throughout this document: that being sensitive to, and

properly reflecting on the emergent processes in the collaboration leads to new and

unexpected developments for the practice.

Haseman also suggests “the double articulation involved in creative arts research, practice

brings into being what, for want of a better word, it names. The research process inaugurates

movement and transformation. It is performative.”5 This notion of 'performative research' is an

important counterpart to the dialogical processes that form the basis of a committed

collaborative practice. The dialogue is in itself performative, as are the dialogues we cultivate

with others as part of our work. It is ostensibly through playful and on-going dialogue, textual

research and performative experiments between ourselves and others that the practice is

brought into being: it becomes transformed and names something new.

2 Webb, M. (1997) Inscriptions, Master of Arts Thesis. Queensland University of Technology. p.82 3 Haseman in Barrett,E., Bolt, B. (eds.) (2007) Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Inquiry. I.B. Taurus & Co. Ltd., New York. p.148. 4 Haseman in Barrett,E., Bolt, B. ibid. p.148. 5 Haseman in Barrett,E., Bolt, B. ibid. p.148.

Chapter 1: Methodology – Collaboration, Authorship, Art in the Discursive Field

7

In a quite fundamental way, the use of ourselves as the primary content and context for the

practice embeds these methodological ideas into the creative work. It also required us to

closely examine and constantly test out how the two approaches to making - the dialogical (as

in the collaboration) and the performative (as in our performance) operate in the process of

developing the project. In relation to the both these approaches, and with respect to notions of

authorship, Estelle Barrett draws upon Foucault’s concept of the Author as function in her

discussion of practice-led research. She states ‘the tendency to privilege more traditional

notions of ‘the work’ as an entity and artist as unique creator of the work […] prevents us from

examining the procedures and systems that allow a work to operate as a ‘mode of existence,

circulation and functioning.’6 In this way the author is conceived of as a function brought into

being by a subject and by the systems that surround it. This is an important point in relation to

developments and processes in the making process but also for the work we have produced.

Both operate in this mode of circulation.

Contestations of the author as an individuated consciousness producing forms are heavily

embedded in the work of many conceptual artists in the late 1960s and 70s. Benjamin Buchloh

states “Conceptual practices […] reflected upon the construction and the role (or the death) of

the author just as much as they redefined the conditions of receivership and the role of the

spectator”7. Conceptual artists were insistent in their re-negotiation of the site and value of

artworks to emphasise the discursive space of art over and above the physicality and

materiality of tradition art objects. Although the material outcomes of these experiments and of

our own work are valuable and important documents of what we have developed over the

course of exploring an idea, for both of us, it is primarily the conceptual and performative

elements of the making process that have proved the most compelling and productive ways for

generating new ideas. This emphasis on performative experimentation is also very much why

we are drawn to Charles Green's discussion of the 'third hand'.

In Catherine and my attempts to articulate the nature and implications of our collaboration we

have drawn heavily on the concept of a 'third' space generated by collaboration between two

individuals. In his book The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to

Postmodernism, Green discusses a model of creative collaborative practice distinct from

bureaucratic, corporate or familial modes of collaboration, one in which the artists construct a

'third hand': “a third artistic identity superimposed over and exceeding the individual artists”8.

This concept is also suggested in Brion Gysin and William Burroughs' book The Third Mind.

Burroughs and Gysin conceive of the 'third mind' as "the complete fusion in a praxis of two

6 Estelle Barrent in Barrett,E., Bolt, B. ibid. p.137. 7 Buchloh, B. (1990) ‘Conceptual Art 1962-1969 From the Aesthetic of Administration to the Critique of Institutions’, October, Vol. 55 (Winter), p. 107. 8 Green, C. op. cit. p.179.

8

subjectivities, two subjectivities that metamorphose into a third; it is from this collusion that a

new author emerges, an absent third person, invisible and beyond grasp, decoding the

silence"9.

Both discussions stress this third space as an active challenge to the tradition of the heroic sole

author; a tradition that the contemporary art world is still very much invested in. Burroughs and

Gysin suggest their collaboration as "the negation of the omnipresent and all-powerful author -

the geometrist who clings to his inspiration as coming from divine inspiration, a mission, or the

dictates of language10. Similarly, albeit in less grandiose terms, Green conceptualises the third

hand as a "strategy to convince the audience of a different understanding of artistic identity”11.

This is certainly the case in our own practice, although our consistent use of competition and

comparison as performative strategies in the work critiques the third hand as a ‘fusion of

subjectivities’. This is also strongly tied to the notion of performativity in that is discussed

throughout this text.

Catherine and I have both experienced a kind of freedom in the collaboration that was not

apparent in our individual practices. For us it has offered "a peculiar relief in going outside the

self."12 It is a situation that allows us to consciously manipulate the subject position of the

'author/s' and explore broad assumptions on the workings of collaboration. This has been

apparent especially in the way in which we have played with our collaborative name since

starting to work together. These operations will be discussed further in the section on the

creative outcomes of the project.

9 Burroughs, W. Gysin, B. (1978) The Third Mind. Viking Press, New York. p18. 10 ibid. p18. 11 Green, C. op. cit., p. 126. 12 Mira Schor in Hollert, T. (2011) ‘Joint Ventures’ Artforum, vol. 49 (no. 6) p. 158.

9

In this next section I will more specifically discuss how our approach to making is framed and

contextualised through the key ideas that inform my thinking and input into the collaborative

process. This section includes discussion on Conceptual Art, performance, collaborative artists

Gilbert and George, humour and gender. These discussions are predominantly developed out

of broad theoretical ideas or approaches rather than specific practices or artworks.

2.1 Conceptual Art

The methods and ideas developed by conceptual artists of the 1960s and 70s continue to

heavily inform our thinking and research, particularly those artists who used the body as a

material. This period constitutes important precedent for an expanded understanding of the

terrain of art to include discursive, social and political contexts. Their work heavily informs our

own methods and has also helped us to reflect upon the ways we contextualise our processes

in and around the gallery/exhibition context. Having said this - it is also important that

embedded in our own thinking around conceptual art and performance is a particular penchant

for play and humour - characteristics that are linked to but not always inextricably bound to the

core interests of many conceptual artists.

Conceptual art opened up the terrain of the 'artwork' to include allusions and disruptions to its

context. It often made interrogations directed at its author/s, its location, and its status in

institutional and commercial sectors. Conceptual art insisted on the re-negotiation of the site of

value in art by foregrounding the discursive space of art over and above the physicality and

materiality of the art object. The processes and the outcomes of our own research look to

these strategies and are concerned with how these systems of circulation and dialogue take

place and are perceived. Our use of performative methods of working amplify these concerns;

we see the use of our bodies as a way to emphasise personal, intersubjective, social and

institutional relationships as material in the work. This approach also affects a consideration of

the artists’ relationship to and possible assimilation or difference from the artwork and the

audience.

Conceptual art has also informed the task-based methods that have developed during the

project. Artists including Sol LeWitt, Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci, etc. often conceived of plans

or rules by which their work would play out. These plans were carefully constructed in order to

produce unknown outcomes within the frame of the work. In a discussion of Sol LeWitt in

relation to the work of Bas Jan Ader’s, critic Jan Verwoert points out how this planning has the

capacity to bring about ‘authentic’ outcomes: “LeWitt was [...] trying to find a way to bring a

moment of necessity into art practice when he proposed that artists should work with a pre-set

Chapter 2: Contextual Review

10

plan, so that the ‘idea becomes the machine that makes the art.’”13 In constructing our own

tasks we look to generate these moments of necessity. They can manifest as moments of

individual crisis, confrontations between us as collaborators, or between us and others. The

idea being that these moments have the capacity to reveal the immediate social, physical or

psychological responses of those directly involved with the work and also those viewing it. Our

work looks to draw out the practical and relational dynamics that are tied to different modes of

representation. LeWitt suggests, "this kind of art is not theoretical or illustrative of theories; it is

intuitive, it is involved with all types of mental processes and it is purposeless"14.

This suggestion of the ‘intuitive’ is perhaps at odds with the detachment and rationalism often

perceived as central to conceptual art. Similarly, although this detachment is often at work in

our own practice it is also perhaps contested by the humourous and sometimes personal

consequences of our projects. This disjunction is discussed by critic Jörg Heiser who suggests

a gap in the understanding of conceptualism and its impact on contemporary art.

In 2007 Heiser produced an exhibition and extensive texts on the subject of ‘romantic

conceptualism’ in which he teases out the romantic qualities apparent in much conceptual art

and the conceptual qualities apparent in the Romantic Movement. He argues that “a)

conceptualist art-making doesn’t have to neglect emotion to make a ‘de-personalized’, i.e.

anti-narcissist statement and b) that that is the case because emotions themselves have a

‘conceptual’ side to them: they are cultural techniques of coming to terms with ones [sic]

environment, whether productively or destructively”15. Though our own work is concerned more

with interpersonal rather than individualised experiences, our own practice also seeks out this

oscillation between detachment and empathy; between the challenge of the embodied act and

its capacity for representing shared experience.

13 LeWitt in Verwoert, J. (2006) Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, One Work Series, Afterall Books, London. p28. 14 LeWitt, S. (1967) ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ Artforum, Vol 5. (No. 10) p. 79. 15 Heiser, J. (2008) ‘All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art’ Art&Research, Vol. 2 (No. 1) Accessed 30 January 2010, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/heiser.html

11

2.2 Tertiary Performance and Documentation

Although were aware of the significance of ‘performance’ as an element in the work,

conventional notions of performance art and theatre often seemed incongruous with the core

concerns of the practice. Early on we worked around the idea of ‘task-based performance’ as

befitted much of performative conceptual experiments of the 1960/70s, but as the work

progresses we came to realise that this term ‘performance’ is something we are actively

negotiating in our approach to making work.

2.2.1 Tertiary Performance

Discussions by Yvonne Rainer and Peggy Phelan in particular have helped me to comprehend

this space. Yvonne Rainer proffers the concept of ‘tertiary performance’:

There are primary, secondary and tertiary performances. Primary

performances are what we are already doing - original material. Most

performance is secondary. I.e. performing someone else’s material, in a

style approximating the original or working in a known style or genre’ […] I

want our spoken stuff to be tertiary - someone else’s material, or material

that has actually previously been brought into existence (via media, or live)

as though it is one’s own, but in a style completely different from or

inappropriate to the original […] It all adds up to a kind of irony that has

always fascinated me […] I feel that the tension is produced from not

knowing whether someone is reciting or saying something - pushes a

performance back and forth.16

We are interested in this quote because it begins to describe a space that is constructed in

order to generate representation but can also be a ‘real’ space in the sense that it is responsive

and unscripted. Rainer’s suggestion also emphasises the ambiguity produced by the use of

appropriated and re-contextualisation material. This use of appropriation foregrounds a

complex play between the experience, construction and representation of subjectivity. This

complexity is also explored in Peggy Phelan’s book Unmarked: The Politics of Performance17.

Phelan argues that the body in performance is metonymic; it stands in for the self.

“Performance uses the performer’s body to pose a question about the inability to secure

relation between subjectivity and the body per se; performance uses the body to frame the lack

of Being promised by and through the body”18. I suggest that this is analogous to the evasive

16 Rainer, Y. in Batchelor, D., Esche, C., Harrison, W., Wood, J. (2000) John Wood and Paul Harrison, •••ellipsis, London. pp. 13-14. 17 Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge, New York and London. 18 ibid. p.146

12

deferrals and substitutions that are becoming more and more central to our practice. This is

because we seek to emphasise this divide (between the body as signifier and the self as

signified). Although our creative work is predominantly not performance in the sense that

Phelan demarcates in this text19, we traverse these politics (of ‘surface’ and ‘essence’) through

literal experiments with ‘presence’ and ‘absence’.

Importantly, the forms, ideas, contexts and subjects that Catherine and I choose to work with

either already carry this metonymic structure or are isolated in a way that temporarily

disengages them from their historic or cultural structure. These forms are heavily articulated

and carry cultural weight insofar as they refer to a broad set of referents outside themselves20;

for example, our use of Warwick Capper in a recent performance. Capper is a point of

convergence for representations and opinions surrounding gender, sport, Australian-ness etc.

By employing him as a subject in a live performance we do not wish to privilege or condemn

him but rather encourage (in a playful way) a reflection on the relationship between his presence

and the ideas that he stands in for.

2.2.2 Documentation

The heavily contested terrain of performance art history (and its inevitable ephemerality and

disappearance) and the legacy of conceptual performance both place an emphasis on the

division between a live event and its subsequent presentation. Conversely, Catherine and I

often find that many of our works flow from a network of possibilities that are generated by the

initial ‘plan’. These possibilities are often constructed out of documentation but are also

augmented by new decisions made whilst processing the original material. I see this space

(post-performance) as an additive space – one whose outcomes can renew or change the

implications of the original performance. In relation to Andrei Monastryski and Russian

performance group Collective Action, Boris Groys notes “ […] this practice [of documentation]

remains open and structurally unfinished – and unfinishable – in time and space […] Here the

originality of the action becomes secondary in relationship to its documentation – every

documentation being not merely a re-presentation of this action but a further contribution to its

creation.”21

19 “Performance’s only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.” ibid. p. 151. 20 This is similar to the logic of the ready-made. 21 Groys, B. (ed) (2011) Empty Zones: Andrei Monastryski and ‘Collective Actions’, (ex. cat.) Black Dog Publishing, London. p. 9.

13

I see these dynamics as closely intertwined with the ideas I mentioned earlier surrounding

presence and absence in performance. It is through experiments in this ‘tertiary’ space that we

are able to play with our own presence or absence/movement or stasis within the various

outcomes of each project.

14

2.3 Gilbert and George

Fig. 4: Gilbert and George, The Singing Sculpture, Image from the performance at the Art Gallery of New South Wales,

August, 1973, Retrieved from Kaldor Art Projects http://kaldorartprojects.org.au (accessed December 17, 2011)

Gilbert and George have been important to us most obviously because of their close, long-term

collaboration and the special implications bound to this activity – the administrative and

communicative idiosyncrasies that arise from this manner of working continue to fascinate us.

Also formative is the manner in which they present themselves to the public. This is linked to

our interest in the discursive potential of art practice and also experimentation with the role and

appearance of artists. Gilbert and George insist upon particular modes of dressing, rigid daily

routines, manners and often carefully constructed dialogue between themselves when

speaking publicly. Their deliberation over this facet of their activity throws into question latent

assumptions about how artists should behave, what political views they should hold, what they

should be saying about their work etc. In doing so they are in a position to evade the

essentialism so demanded by the biographical approach to art history. Artists including Marcel

Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Martin Kippenberger also looked to break with this tradition by

actively propagating personas that occupied unexpected positions within society and the art

world.

Gilbert and George’s conservative dress code and political views are one example of the ways

they play with, as well as challenge well-worn cultural stereotypes. The idea that artists are

routinely radical and left-leaning has long been accepted, especially so in the 1960s when

Marxist ideas enjoyed a strong revival. George notes, “you’re not allowed to be Conservative in

This figure is not available online. Please consult the hardcopy thesis

available from the QUT Library.

15

the art world, of course.”22 In disrupting expectations surrounding the politics of the artists,

Gilbert and George are in a position to dislodge the cynical and dogmatic attitudes toward the

issues they address. In Ranciere’s terms, they favour “a multiplicity of small ruptures, of small

shifts, [and] refuse the blackmail of radical subversion.23

Also important is how Gilbert and George take this method further still by proclaiming

themselves as ‘living sculptures’. In doing so they subject their lives and views to the reflective

consideration ushered in by the term ‘art’. This approach links their personal lives to with the

loftiest of philosophical, cultural and political implications. Ratcliff suggests "They remained

dedicated to a monumental notion of propriety that links personal behaviour to the largest

structures of the culture - its architecture of belief and value […] [they] want, indeed, to turn

themselves into institutional presences, like buildings or the structures of bureaucracy and

social class."24 This strategy renders their subjectivities simultaneously full and empty; "their

surface is their essence their essence is their surface."25 The ambiguity and evasiveness of this

approach is also important to Charles Green who emphasises the 'third hand' as an

“emphatically elusive and deliberately evasive construction”26.

22 Passmore, G. quoted in Praagh, A. V. (2009) ‘Gilbert and George: 'Margaret Thatcher did a lot for art'’ Daily Mail July 5 2009 Accessed December 20 2011 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-news/5743120/Gilbert-and-George-Margaret-Thatcher-did-a-lot-for-art.html 23 Ranciere in Carnevale, F., Kelsey, J., Ranciere, J. (2007) Art of the Possible, Herman, J. (trans.) Artforum, Vol. 45 (No. 7). pp. 266-267.

24 Ratcliff, C., Rosenblum, R. (1993) Gilbert and George: The Singing Sculpture. Thames and Hudson, London. p.33. 25 Ibid. p.36. 26 Green, C. op. cit. p.125.

16

Fig. 5: Gilbert and George, George the Cunt and Gilbert the Shit A Magazine Sculpture, 1969, Mixed Media, 305mm x

484mm, Tate / National Galleries of Scotland. Reproduced from Tate http://www.tate.org.uk (accessed November 15,

2011)

In our own work, whether by replacing ourselves with cardboard cut-outs or inviting Warwick

Capper to appear on our behalf, this evasiveness encourages a more complex consideration of

our plural status as artworks/artists/performers/collaborators/persons; as both representing

and represented. In contrast to the artists mentioned here, the evasion in our own work is often

made possible through strategies of remoteness (through the mediation of photogtraphy and

video and also deapan humour) and substitution.

This figure is not available online. Please consult the hardcopy thesis available from the

QUT Library.

17

2.4 Emergent Concerns: Humour & Gender

I have grouped notions of humour and gender as I have begun to see them as circulating

together in many of our works. I will first discuss the ways that I see humour emerging in the

practice and then briefly touch on how I imagine this to be related to gender politics. This

discussion will be particularly speculative partly due to the indeterminacy of these issues and

also because of the recentness of their emergence as deliberate investigations in our work.

Since the beginning of our collaboration, humour has been central to the way Catherine and I

relate to each other, but only more recently has this trait emerged fully as an important strategy

at work in the practice. As with the other strategies I have discussed (collaboration and

performance) I see it as important in generating ‘tertiary’ or ‘in-between’ spaces in the practice;

spaces that allow for slippages in meaning and unexpected moments to occur; “the comic [is]

precisely that which briefly annuls the order of things and allows us to experience a momentary

liberating blow.”27

The humour at work in our practice is based on situations constructed for our own

participation. These situations work to destablise and explore our own relationship and our

connections with others (audience, artists, peers etc). These investigations are often the result

of an appropriation and collage of specific cultural material (as with the ceramic Puffin in

Birdwatching and the Tate interview in We’re always trying not to repeat ourselves) and also

more generalised modes of representation and behavior (as in Networking and Gorillas in the

Mist). This intertextual play is discussed by Mark Webb in an analysis of his own practice:

“Intertextual play as a mode of research enables the constellation of networks that develop out

of it to aggregate in unexpected ways, and may appear as complex fields that cannot be easily

or clearly defined”28. Catherine and I tend to navigate this field with the express purpose of

unearthing humourous incongruities or contradictions.

Catherine and I have long been enamoured by British comedy programs, many of which

liberally employ deadpan and self-deprecating routines. Both of these approaches are at work

in our practice. I understand the notion of the ‘deadpan’ as a mode of delivery marked by a

pretense of seriousness or calm detachment. This feature of the work took shape quite literally

in our early performances in which we remained po-faced whilst enacting absurd physical

tasks. In the case of our more recent work this term can be applied broadly (beyond its typical

application in speech or physical comedy) to the forms in which we present our work. By

choosing to present much of our work in forms other than performance, it might be seen that

we enact the same deferrals made by deadpan facial expressions in comedy. The deferrals we

make via, photography, video and other more inventive forms of presentation, require careful

27 Lunn, F., Munder, H.(eds.) (2006) When Humour Becomes Painful, JRP|Ringer, Zurich. p.11. 28 Webb, M. (2011) Stage Two Proposal for the PhD. Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane.

18

calibration in order for the ‘joke’ to remain ambiguous and for its deadpan quality to retain

maximum impact. The deadpan approach also allows us to take on these modes (from video

art or conceptual photography for example) with an attitude of both parody and reverence –

mining their maturity whilst disturbing their stability as forms of representation.

Self-deprecation is also significant in that our work is often developed through and around

situations in which one or both of us are bound for failure or embarrassment. This is connected

to our drive to make works that challenge and test us as individuals and as a collaborative pair.

Felicity Lunn and Heikie Munder suggest that “humour and art share much in common […]

both ignore all barriers, permit contradictions and constitute an experimental space where

human concerns are introduced to us in all their relativities, with one’s own failure always in

view. Manifest in this kind of humour is a preparedness to test its own identity and put it on the

line”29. This play on our own identities and relationship is both ‘liberating and troubling’30; it is

full of ‘doubtful constancy and constant doubt’31.

This tension is also at the core of my thinking around gender and feminism. Although much of

our work overtly encourages discussion around gender we have only recently begun to

consciously discuss (or perhaps face) its implications for our work. The issue of gender arose

early on in our collaboration when we began appropriating source material by male artists (in

We’re always trying not to repeat ourselves and I’ll be honest with you. I just need a body next

to me. That’s all I need, you need it as much as I do). Our more recent works Capper and

Gorillas in the Mist are perhaps even more explicit examples of a tendency to play with our

subject and object positions as female artists. This and recent research I have undertaken into

women in the comedy profession have led me into begin to contemplate how women are

perceived in relation to humour and possible strength of humour in exploring the ambiguous

terrain of feminism today in that humour can be “a way of getting ‘under the skin’ of emotionally

and socially difficult subject matter”32.

29 Lunn, F., Munder, H. op. cit. p.11 30 Webb, op. cit. p.21 31 Heiser. op.cit. p.2 32 Higgie. op.cit. p15

19

This chapter looks to situate the projects we have developed amongst the methodological and

contextual ideas discussed above. The list of works in this section is not exhaustive. I have

chosen to focus on works that have been particularly formative in the trajectory of the practice

since beginning the Masters in 2009.

3.1 I’ll be honest with you ok. I just need a body next to me. That’s all I need,

you need it as much as I do (2009)

Although we consider our work to be ‘performative’, our attitude to live performance has

changed significantly since the early stages of the practice. We were initially interested in

modes of performance that employed endurance tactics especially through the use our bodies

in static positions. Potentially, this use of static body was an early instance of the deferrals that I

discussed earlier in relation to humour and also Peggy Phelan’s ideas on performance;

deferrals as working to a cause consideration of the how body can ‘stand in’ for subjectivity. In

one of our earliest performances, ‘I’ll be honest with you ok. I just need a body next to me.

That’s all I need, you need it as much as I do’ (2009) we locked each other into 20kg balls and

chains for 90 minute stretches as we listened to the audio from Vito Acconci’s Theme Song

video of 1973. This and other live endurance works helped us to work through this interest in

the possible use of the body as both subjective and semiotic force.

Fig. 6: Performance Documentation of I’ll be honest with you ok. I just need a body next to me. That’s all I need, you

need it as much as I do (2009)

Chapter 3: Analysis of Work

20

This work also helped us to realise that for us, endurance as show of psychological and

physical stamina (as in the work of Marina Abramovic for example) was much less important

than the act of our appropriation of and even parody of it. This is played up by the use of the

ball and chain, and the ambiguity of two female artists stuck listening to Vito Acconci for hours

on end. This appropriation and re-enactment is now a fundamental element of the practice.

21

3.2 We are always trying not to repeat ourselves (2009)

A more flagrant example of appropriation was at work in our parody/homage to collaborative

artists Paul Harrison and John Wood. These artists have been important as role models for our

own collaboration since being introduced to their work via an interview conducted by the Tate

Museum uploaded to YouTube. We were immediately fascinated their formal, cause-and-effect

way of working with the body and producing humour. This fascination and admiration for their

work led us to re-make the interview with Catherine and I playing Paul and John. As with many

other works, I see this video as a very literal experiment, made in response to our own desire

for success and our fascination with the humourous ingenuity of Paul and John’s work.

Fig. 7: Video Stills from We are always trying not to repeat ourselves (2009)

The difficulty of gaining access to their work first hand (as it is predominantly video-based) and

our interest in the way artists present themselves in the discursive spaces ‘outside’ the artwork,

made this video especially pertinent as material for our practice. By responding to the interview

format and utilising the video response mechanisms of YouTube we looked to work within the

contextual and discursive spaces circulating around their work. Posting on YouTube also

opened the work to further comment and eventually led to the mentorship we will be

undertaking with the artists in late 2012. These chance outcomes steadily became more

important as we looked to design works that could actively pursue or incorporate unknown

outcomes.

22

Fig. 8: Screen capture depicting video response to TateShots Issue 12 - Harrison and Wood, 2008, Retrieved from

YouTube, http://youtube.com/ (accessed November 17, 2011)

This figure is not available online. Please consult the hardcopy thesis available

from the QUT Library.

23

3.3 Duel (2010)

An important aspect of our work since beginning the Masters has been our treatment of our

collaborative name. In repeatedly dislodging the name of the practice we mean to explore and

contest institutional protocols and broader assumptions on the workings of collaboration. Since

2008 the practice has undergone three name changes. We first exhibited under the

pseudonym ‘Fiona Mail’. In doing this we relinquished individual naming rights but also

experienced a sense of relief in having a phantom-self represent the face of the practice. The

pseudonym also aligned with the tentative nature of our work together at that time as we were

still maintaining solo practices.

Then in August 2010 we staged a live fencing Duel at the opening of Institute of Modern Art’s

Fresh Cut exhibition, the winner of the bout secured name rights of the collaboration for the

period of one year. For three-months leading up to the bout we took fencing lessons and

explored the sport’s dual history as both formal competitive sport and dramatic staged conflict.

Fencing was also attractive to us because of its connection to notions of spectacle, masculinity,

violence, play and romance. This choice is also an example of how we deliberately seek to

appropriate material that is laden with cultural significance.

Fig. 9: Performance Documentation of Duel (2010)

In September 2011 Catherine’s naming right expired and we are now known as ‘Catherine or

Kate’. This approach to naming is also very much a form of play; a method of keeping our

24

audience interested in and speculative about the author of the work and the stability of our

relationship as collaborators.

25

3.4 Mazda 121 Residency (2010)

Fig. 10: Video Stills from Mazda 121 Residency 2010

After spending significant amounts of time together in my car as part of our work for No Frills*

Artist-run Initiative, Catherine and I began to develop a special interest in it as a concept and

site for making and presenting art. We began looking the ways that cars are discussed and

presented, and observed the ways they are often subject to a kind of humourous

personification. As both object and architecture, we also liked the way that cars can organise a

particular social dynamics (especially between passenger and driver) and the ways these

dynamics are broadly represented.

Out of this interest in the car and our general thirst for travel as young artists, we came up with

a plan to stage a one-week residency inside my car - a small white Mazda 121. Although this

26

residency has not yet come to fruition (due to a car accident) we shot a 30-minute video of us

driving the passenger pick-up loop at the Brisbane Airport. As a play on the idea of a journey

signified by the car, its location and the 'residency' we employed the 'Shire Theme' track from

the Lord of the Rings movie soundtrack. In contrast to the original movie context we use it

diegetically - we listen to the sound as it plays inside the car and after the track ends Catherine

reaches to press repeat; in doing so we insert ourselves into the conventions of looped video

and also cinematic music. We experience the effects of signification within the moment of

subjective experience.

This work also overlays travel companionship onto artistic collaboration. Our attempts to remain

po-faced in this video resulted in remote facial expressions that could be read as attending

conflict. This element of the work is an example of the potentially comic manipulations of our

relationship we often use as material in the practice.

27

3.5 I’m the kind of person you should choose to have with you (2010)

Fig. 11: Installation View of I’m the kind of person you should choose to have with you (2010)

Fig. 12: Video stills from I’m the kind of person you should choose to have with you (2010)

I’m the kind of person you should choose to have with you occupies an odd position in our

practice. Comprising of a large jetty and two-channel video this work Catherine and I sought to

invoke a contemplative space in the gallery and practically test out and re-present the charged

act of sinking a boat. These components are augmented by the second channel of the video,

depicting a figure looking out to sea in the early morning. These images appeal to larger

narratives that explore the sublime, spirituality and death. In contrast to the content of many of

our other works, these concerns are strangely sentimental.

Bas Jan Ader and discussions around his work by Jörg Heiser and Jan Verwoert have been

particularly pertinent in my thinking around this work. Many of Ader’s works consist of absurd

28

physical tests that implicate both comedy and tragedy. Similarly, in I’m the kind of person you

should choose to have with you there are elements of the absurd and of parody at work, but

the contemplative romanticism of the space and the pace of the videos exert a solemnity that is

not present in many of our other works. Verwoert, in a discussion of Ader’s last work In search

of the Miraculous (1975) in which he died in an attempt to cross the Atlantic ocean, suggests

that “Ader does not insist on the validity of the romantic idea or deny its erosion like a stubborn

traditionalist [...] The experiment lies precisely in the attempt, against these odds, to find out if

the idea has any meaning or not” (Verwoert, 10). This comment is valuable as an observation

about Ader’s reduction and implementation of dramatic narratives as a strategy for investigating

their practical implications. This process of reduction is very much at work in our own practice

and in our treatment of the narrative of drowning at sea in I’m the kind of person you should

choose to have with you.

29

3.6 Networking (2011)

Fig. 13: Installation View Networking (2011)

In February 2011 No Frills* Artist Run Initiative was invited to make up the Brisbane contingent

of Eastern Seaboard; an exhibition of work by Artist Run Initiatives from the eastern coast of

Australia. During the residency we sent cardboard cut-outs of ourselves to Post Museum,

Singapore and made a request that current residents (and peers), the directors of Boxcopy

Contemporary Art Space, introduce them to eminent figures in the Singapore art scene. This

idea was motivated by our anxiousness to begin travelling and further testing the strength of the

collaboration. The work speaks to this desire for emerging artists to establish themselves

internationally and the process of networking that is linked to this. In doing so we hoped to

point out the anxiety that often attends young artists making professional contacts, but also,

more simply, it is also a joke on the shallowness of networking.

The work displayed for the exhibition at Artspace (and Boxcopy) includes five life size

freestanding cardboard cut-outs of us and three members of Boxcopy. As part of the display of

this work at Artspace we asked the Boxcopy members present at the introductions to send us

photographs of themselves. This self-portraiture exercise also became an important part of the

project as it mirrored our interest in the processes of self-representation that we all attend to,

particularly as artists.

30

Two videos portray our travels in Singapore. The first is video of an image of our cut-outs being

introduced to Matthew Ngui, the Director of the Singapore Biennale; Channon Goodwin,

Boxcopy Director, describes this encounter in a voice over. In this footage the humourous

impotence of the project is underscored by the failure of Boxcopy to produce video

documentation of our introduction to Matthew Ngui. The footage of the photograph of the

event that resulted from this fault also works to echo the strange mid-presence of life-size

cardboard cut-outs. This project began to seed a more explicit exploration in our practice, of

representation, appearance and identity which is followed up in Capper (2011) and Survey

(2011). The second video depicts our experience of Singapore nightlife and tourist destinations.

31

3.7 Capper (2011)

Fig. 14: Warrick Capper Website (accessed October 18, 2011)

Fig. 15: Warwick Capper with artist Damiano Bertoli at the opening of IMA at Surfers. (2011)

This figure is not available online. Please consult the hardcopy thesis available

from the QUT Library.

32

In July 2011 we were invited to do a performance for the opening of a gallery in Surfers

Paradise. In response we invited Warwick Capper to appear on our behalf. The request to

perform for the opening became a point of contention for us as we increasingly did not identify

as ‘performance artists’ (as discussed elsewhere). By replacing ourselves with Warwick Capper

we sought to address with notions of presence whilst also playing on Capper’s strong

identification and promotion of Gold Coast culture. Capper was also interesting to us as a kind

of ready-made; he performs himself as a career. We recognised in him the idea of a partial

objectivity toward his own identity; his persona is both authentic and studied.

33

3.8 Survey (2011)

Fig. 16: Excerpt from photographic series; installation views of Survey (2011)

Following on from the Artspace residency we spent three months in Seyðisfjörður, a remote

town on the East Coast of Iceland. Our experience of remote districts in Iceland triggered an

interested in the modes of representation associated with tourism and travel such as tourist

photography, travel literature and advertising, mythologised landscapes and souvenirs. This

particular work looks to provide an antithesis to this material by exploiting the globally

ubiquitous setting of the gas station.

At the very simplest level, gas stations break up the narrative and provide

an opportunity for reflection on the journey or a dilemma. However, gas

stations also act as scenes of sanctuary (the washroom), conflict (pity

those poor attendants), and communication (they had pay phones long

before cell-phones existed)33

Driving the northern route from Seyðisfjörður to Reykjavík we stopped at 20 service stations

and asked each attendant which one of us they believed was better looking. This question

33 Abebooks (n.d.) Pump and Circumstance – Gas Stations in Literature, Accessed October 25 2011, http://www.abebooks.com/docs/Community/Featured/gas-stations.shtml

34

requires that the attendants disregard normative social etiquette and verbalise a comparative

judgment in front of us. We found the power of this etiquette quite incredible in that it was often

difficult and sometimes impossible to gain an answer. While the exercise and outcomes are

knowingly futile, the moment of the exchange was extremely charged. The awkwardness of the

transaction often moved people to draw others into the discussion, to seek verification of the

question but also to relieve them of accountability for their response.

To document Survey we took a photo of the attendant (with permission) and asked that they

photograph us. The works current configuration is a series of 18 twin-framed photographs with

an accompanying text tallying the results: Kate 5, Catherine 4, No Answer 11. As in Duel

(2011), this outward process of competition between two also contradicts the unspoken

equality that is often associated with dual collaboration.

3.9 Gorillas in the Mist (2011)

Fig. 17: Installation view of Gorillas in the Mist (2011)

‘Gorillas in the Mist’ is a single channel video of Catherine and I streaking in the Icelandic

landscape. There are three iterations set in different locations and each contains long stretches

of landscape preceding the act. The fixed-camera and detached framing of this work ease

viewers into an idealised view of the landscape. In this work we were interested in interrupting

the emphasis on the natural landscape prominent in Icelandic tourism whose slogan reads

“Pure. Natural. Unspoiled. Iceland. The Way Life Should Be”.

For our final exhibition at Metro Arts, Gorillas in the Mist was projected onto a screen mounted

on the tray of a Toyota Hilux. Viewers can access the work by taking a passenger seat in my

35

Mazda 121 which follows the Hilux as it drives a block around the inner city. This manifestation

of the work positions the video and the viewer in public space and in motion. It also re-

introduces the act of streaking as a public spectacle, opens the work to incidental viewers and

foregrounds the aforementioned interest in the car as a site for making and hosting work.

Similarly to Mazda 121 Residency this work signals an inquiry into passenger-driver

relationships and the possibility of the intimate setting of the car to produce humour.

Fig. 18: Video still from Gorillas in the Mist 2011

The title of the work is taken from the 1988 film Gorillas in the Mist featuring Sigourney Weaver

as Dian Fossey, a scientist who travels to Africa to study the vanishing mountain gorillas. The

title also references the Guerrilla Girls - these strong allusions to feminism, and the use of our

naked bodies is indicative of the shifts taking place in the practice toward the use of humour

and its potential to implicate and explore gender politics.

36

This research project has considered how the experience of working in collaboration can

generate a new model for thinking about practice-led methodologies in visual arts. It has aimed

to demonstrate this by mapping out and elaborating on the processes and approaches to

making that fellow Masters student Catherine Sagin and I have come to use in our alliance as

‘Fiona Mail’, ‘Catherine Sagin’ and ‘Catherine or Kate’. It also identifies areas for further

research, especially that of humour and gender politics.

The research undertaken in both creative practice and critical analysis of other art and ideas

has helped me to make structural observations about the research and articulate the dynamics

of our approaches to collaboration, performance and humour and also to consider the

emergence of gender and feminism as increasingly important concerns for the practice. The

techniques of appropriation and re-enactment that we have developed over the course of the

Masters have enabled us to investigate and test out the systems of identification that circulate

in the diverse contexts that surround us. The ideas and approaches discussed in this paper

also mark a challenge to the tradition of individuated discussions of visual arts practice and

looks to inaugurate new models of creative research that incorporate the possibilities that

attend collaboration. As such we hope that this thesis not only signals the beginning of a much

more expansive collaboration between Catherine and I, but that it also might also serve as a

template for other collaborative ventures in contemporary visual art practice.

Conclusion

37

Abebooks (n.d.) Pump and Circumstance – Gas Stations in Literature, Accessed October 25

2011, http://www.abebooks.com/docs/Community/Featured/gas-stations.shtml

Acconci, V., Basta, S., Ricciardi, G. (eds.) (2006) Vito Acconci: Diary of a Body 1969-1979,

Edizioni Charta srl, Milano.

Allington, E. (n.d.) The Manners of Making and the Useful Bench, Accessed April 20 2011,

http://collabarts.org/?p=63.

Anderson, L. (1979) ‘from Americans on the Move’ October Vol. 8 (Spring) pp. 45-57.

Barret, D. (n.d) Co-operating Then and Now, Accessed April 20 2011,

http://collabarts.org/?p=59

Barrett,E., Bolt, B. (eds.) (2007) Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Inquiry. I.B.

Taurus & Co. Ltd., New York.

Barthes, R. (1975) Roland Barthes, Howard, R. (trans.) Macmillan Press, London.

Barthes, R. (1977) Image Music text, Fontana Press, London.

Batchelor, D., Esche, C., Harrison, W., Wood, J. (2000) John Wood and Paul Harrison,

•••ellipsis, London.

Bowring, B. (2011) ‘Jack Goldstein. Two Boxers, Time and Again’ Afterall, Accessed November

24 2011, http://www.afterall.org/online/jack-goldstein-two-boxers-twice

Brunette, P., Wills, D. (eds.) (1994) Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media Architecture.

Cambridge University Press, New York.

Buchloh, B. (1990) ‘Conceptual Art 1962-1969 From the Aesthetic of Administration to the

Critique of Institutions’, October, Vol. 55 (Winter), pp. 105-143.

Burroughs, W. Gysin, B. (1978) The Third Mind. Viking Press, New York.

Burton, J. (ed.) (2006) Cindy Sherman, October Files, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Butler, J. (2004) ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An essay in phenomenology and

feminist theory’ in Bial, H. (ed.), The Performance Studies Reader. 2nd edn., Routledge, London

and New York: pp.187-199.

Bibliography

38

Carnevale, F., Kelsey, J., Ranciere, J. (2007) Art of the Possible, Herman, J. (trans.) Artforum,

Vol. 45 (No. 7). pp. 256-259,261-264,266-267,269,10.

Culler, J. (2008) On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, Routledge,

Abingdon.

Cunningham, D.M., Damp., Koop, S. (2008) Group Group Show (ex. Cat.), Melbourne, VCA

Margaret Lawrence Gallery.

Derrida, J. (2004) ‘Excerpt from “Signature Event Context”’ in Bial, H. (ed.), The Performance

Studies Reader. 2nd edn., Routledge, London and New York: pp.184-186.

Dika, V. (2003) Recycled Culture in Contemporary Art and Film: The Uses of Nostalgia,

Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom.

Duchamp, M., Viau, G. (1960) To Change Names, Simply - Interview with Marcel Duchamp.

Kilbourne S.S. (trans.) Accessed June 20 2011,

http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_4/interviews/md_guy/md_guy.html

Dunhill, M., O'Brien, T. (n.d) Collaborative Art Practice and the Fine Art Curriculum, Accessed

April 30 2011, http://collabarts.org/?p=205

Fisher, J. (1985) ‘Jack Goldstein’ in Jack Goldstein 'Feuer / Körper / Licht’, Städtische Galerie,

Erlangen.

Fisher, J. (1997) ‘Interperformance: The Live Tableaux of Suzanne lacy, Janine Antoni, and

Marina Abramovic’, Art Journal, vol. 56 (Winter) pp. 28-33.

Fraser, A. La, K.T. (2010) ‘Spotlight - Andrea Fraser’ The Crimson, Accessed April 26 2011,

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2010/3/30/fraser-art-institutional/

Galenson, D. (2006) You Cannot be Serious: The Conceptual Innovator as Trickster, NBER

Working Paper series, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Goldberg, B. (1999) ‘A Genealogy of the Ridiculous from ‘Humours’ to Humour’, Outlines, Vol.

1 (No. 1), pp. 59-71.

Goldberg, R. (1980) ‘Performance-Art for All?’, Art Journal, Vol. 40 (no. 1/2) pp. 369-376.

Green, C. (2001) The Third Hand: Collaboration from Conceptualism to Post-Modernism,

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.

Groys, B. (ed) (2011) Empty Zones: Andrei Monastryski and ‘Collective Actions’, (ex. cat.) Black

Dog Publishing, London.

39

Harrison, P. et. al. (2006) 124 Minutes: John Wood and Paul Harrison. Ffotogallery, Cadiff.

Harrison, W., Wood, J. (2002) John Wood and Paul Harrison: Twenty Six (Drawing and Falling

Things), Picture This Moving Image, Bristol.

Heiser, J. (2008) ‘All of a Sudden: Things that Matter in Contemporary Art’ Art&Research, Vol. 2

(No. 1) Accessed 30 January 2010, http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n1/heiser.html

Heiser, J., Seifermann, E. (2007) Romantic Conceptualism, (ex. cat.) Kunsthalle Nürnburg and

BEWAG Foundation, Vienna.

Higgie, J. (ed.) (2007) The Artist’s Joke, Whitechapel, London / MIT Press, Cambridge,

Massachusetts.

Hollert, T. (2011) ‘Joint Ventures’ Artforum, vol. 49 (no. 6) pp. 158-161.

Iles, C. (2003) ‘Vanishing Act’ Artforum, Vol. 41 (No. 9) pp. 23-24.

Isaak, J. A. (1996) Feminism and Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s

Laughter, Re Visions: Critical Studies in the History and Theory of Art, Routledge, London and

New York.

Kaiarzyna, M. (1999) ‘Performing Life, Living Art: Abramovic/Ulay and KwiKulik’, Afterimage,

vol. 27 (no. 3) pp. 15-18.

Krauss, R. (1976) ‘Video - The Aesthetics of Narcissism.’ October, Vol. 1 (Spring) pp. 50-64.

Krauss, R. (1977) ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America’ (1) October, Vol. 3 (Spring),

pp. 61-88.

Krauss, R. (1979) ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ October, Vol. 8 (Spring) pp. 30-44.

Krauss. R. (1981) Passages in Modern Sculpture. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Le Feuvre, L. (ed.) (2010) Failure, Whitechapel, London / MIT Press, Cambridge,

Massachusetts.

LeWitt, S. (1967) ‘Paragraphs on Conceptual Art’ Artforum, Vol 5. (No. 10) pp. 79-83.

Lippard, L.R. (1997) Six years, University of California Press, California.

Livingstone, M., Tate Publishing (2007) Gilbert and George, (ex. cat.) Tate Publishing, London.

Lunn, F., Munder, H.(eds.) (2006) When Humour Becomes Painful, JRP|Ringer, Zurich.

40

Malik, A. (2009) Sarah Lucas: Au Natural, One Work Series, Afterall Books, London.

Mecêdo, S. (1999) ‘Collaboration in Art: Sharing the Space of One?’ Master of Arts Thesis,

University of Northumbria, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Molesworth, H. (ed) (2003) Work Ethic (ex. cat.) Pennsylvania University Press, University Park.

Molon, D., Rooks, M. (2005) Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art, (ex. cat.), Independent

Curators International, New York.

Owens, C. (1980) ‘The Allegorical impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism (1)’ October

Vol. 12 (Spring) pp. 67-86.

Palmer, J. (1994) Taking Humour Seriously, Routledge, London and New York.

Papastergiadis, N. (n.d.) The Global Need for Collaboration, Accessed April 30 2011,

http://collabarts.org/?p=201

Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge, New York and London.

Praagh, A. V. (2009) ‘Gilbert and George: 'Margaret Thatcher did a lot for art'’ Daily Mail July 5

2009 Accessed December 20 2011 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-

news/5743120/Gilbert-and-George-Margaret-Thatcher-did-a-lot-for-art.html

Pruzan, T. (1998) ‘Making Mischief’, Print, Vol. LII (no. VI), pp. 86-92.

Ratcliff, C., Rosenblum, R. (1993) Gilbert and George: The Singing Sculpture. Thames and

Hudson, London.

Reust, H. R. (2000) ‘Smith/Stewart’, Georgiea, M. (trans.), Artforum, vol.39 (no.2) pp. 152.

Rogoff, I. (n.d) Production lines, Accessed April 20 2011, http://collabarts.org/?p=69

Roth, N. (n.d.) Collaboration and Originality, Accessed April 20 2011,

http://collabarts.org/?p=198

Sheets, H. M. (2009) ‘Serious Play’ Art in America. (November 2009) pp.176-182.

Sollins, S., Sundell, N.C. (n.d.) Team Spirit, Accessed April 20 2011,

http://collabarts.org/?p=68

Szeemann, H. (1969) When Attitudes Bcome Form, (ex. cat.) Kunsthalle Berne, Switzerland.

41

Ulmer, G. (1985) Applied Grammartology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph

Beuys, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore.

Valery, P. (1989) ‘Some Simple Reflections on the Body’ in Feher, M., Naddaff, R., Nadia, T.

(eds.), Fragments for a History of the Human Body (Part Two) — Zone 4., Urzone Inc, New

York pp.395-405

Verwoert, J. (2006) Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, One Work Series, Afterall

Books, London.

Webb, M. (1997) Inscriptions, Master of Arts Thesis. Queensland University of Technology.

Webb, M. (2011) Stage Two Proposal for the PhD. Queensland University of Technology,

Brisbane.

Wood, C. (2007) Yvonne Rainer: The Mind is a Muscle, One Work Series, Afterall Books,

London.

42

Supplementary Creative Work