The AAANZ PhD prize is judged on the merits of the final submitted thesis or exegesis and documentation of a recently graduated PhD student. In 2022 the format of the annual PhD prize changed. This followed a review by the AAANZ Prize Committee that took into consideration feedback received from former and potential entrants, academics and former members of the judging panel. In 2022 there were twenty-three entries, of which, four were shortlisted.
WINNER
$1000 sponsored by Taylor and Francis
Kirsty Baker, ‘Constituting the “Woman Artist”: A feminist genealogy of Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history 1928 – 1989’, (Victoria University of Wellington Te Herenga Waka)
Abstract
This thesis considers the ways in which the figure of the ‘woman artist’ has been constituted in published sources in Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history, between 1928 and 1989. Most of the texts dedicated specifically to women artists in this country were written in the latter half of the twentieth century, and were produced with the intention of writing women artists back in to the histories from which they had been excluded. This thesis operates from a different perspective. Rather than assuming a starting point of women’s absence from a national art history, it traces instead those written representations of the ‘woman artist’ as they exist in the published literature. Through the construction of a genealogy of such representation, this thesis examines the ideologies which are both embedded in, and perpetuated by them. In doing so it makes evident and interrogates the gendered power dynamics which have shaped the writing of Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history.
This thesis is structured chronologically, charting the formation and expansion of a coherent national arts discourse against shifting notions of national and cultural identity. The trajectory of this discourse was shaped by a canonical impulse, constructing an unfolding narrative which centres upon a succession of key artistic figures. This thesis argues that the structuring of this – largely male, Pākehā – narrative, acted to subsume gendered difference, rendering women increasingly
peripheral within its pages. The model of subsumed difference is also apparent in feminist critiques of this dominant art history, which are critically interrogated in the latter half of this thesis. As women sought to challenge the relative exclusion of women artists from this dominant narrative, they also perpetuated their own exclusions, often in terms of culture or sexuality.
Through discursive analysis of both ‘mainstream’ art history, and the feminist writings which addressed it, this thesis presents two significant arguments. First, that stereotypical representations of women artists play a structural role – to marginalise women – within Aotearoa New Zealand’s art history. Secondly, that feminist interrogations of such histories failed to account for the multiplicity of women’s subjectivity. I conclude by instantiating and calling for an alternative approach that challenges the subsuming of such difference within a single, homogenous narrative. Such an approach will produce histories that interrogate, rather than perpetuate, the gendered and cultural power dynamics embedded within society.
Shortlisted
Luise Guest, ‘(In)Visible Ink: enacting gender and Chineseness in contemporary art’, (University of New South Wales)
Abstract
This thesis presents a critical examination of contemporary experimental ink practices (shiyan shuimo) and calligraphy (shufa) in the work of four women artists in the People’s Republic of China – Bingyi, Ma Yanling, Tao Aimin and Xiao Lu. The thesis highlights the gendered histories and nationalist legacies of ink painting and calligraphy associated with the literati tradition and with its post-Cultural Revolution reinventions. Three distinct strands of transcultural feminist theory are employed to provide a situated and intersectional interpretative framework: Qing Dynasty anarcho-feminist He-Yin Zhen’s gendering category of nannü; Ella Shohat’s notion of ‘subterranean feminisms’ operating in contexts outside Euro-America; and the ‘alternative’ feminist travelling and translation theory proposed by Min Dongchao. Through this framework the artists’ work is considered in relation to the broader discourses and practices of contemporary art in/from China (Zhongguo dangdai yishu) and the alignments and tensions of feminist theory and practice across cultures. The analytical methodology, informed by feminist art history and ethnography, is sensitive to the complexities of gendered life experiences of sexuality, fertility, intergenerational relations, domestic labour, menopause and aging, and the position of women artists in unequal structures and systems of power. Considering the four artists’ work in relation to these experiences, the thesis provides new knowledge and critical analysis of experimental ink painting/calligraphy and the under-recognised contribution of women artists to contemporary art in the People’s Republic of China. The artists’ work is interpreted as creating nannü spaces, from which women can actively shape practice, concluding that the materiality of their work, alluding to the masculinist history of literati painting, is central to an understanding of its counter-patriarchal force.
Shortlisted
Rebecca Edwards, ‘The supremacy of decoration: The influence and legacy of the decorative practice of Frank Brangwyn in the Edwardian era’, (University of Melbourne)
Abstract
This study offers a new perspective on the practice of British artist Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) by establishing the aesthetic and functional ‘supremacy of decoration’ across his work of the first decades of the twentieth century. The term decorative was widely used in contemporary art discourse throughout Great Britain and Europe; yet a definition is elusive and problematic. The label is not, and has never been static, indiscriminately applied to a range of media and across different time periods. Focusing upon Brangwyn’s practice during the Edwardian era and its legacy, this thesis considers this concept through the formal and theoretical tenets of the mural and decorative painting movements, establishing the existence of a decorative formalism in the artist’s work and linking this characteristic directly with his critical and popular appeal.
Furthermore, it traces the manifestation of this aesthetic approach outside of site-specific and functional sites of decoration to more autonomous contexts through examination of the artist’s intaglio prints – so called ‘painters’ etchings’ that were widely produced in England and Europe by the late nineteenth century. Through analysing Brangwyn’s role as a teacher in London and the circulation and impact of his prints outside of Britain in Australia, this study also shows that his decorative formalism was observed, admired and to varying extents, adopted by his younger contemporaries seeking to reflect a more modern perspective. The threads of British art explored in this thesis have rarely been linked with subsequent developments made by modern artists. Indeed the appeal of the decorative as a progressive formal strategy was short-lived and soon surpassed by other activities of the avant-garde. As this study reveals however, while Brangwyn was not a driving force behind modernism, his ‘decorative’ work of the Edwardian era anticipated many of the aesthetic concerns of modernity and is representative of one of the many unacknowledged ways in which artists began to articulate formal approaches to the picture plane in the early twentieth century.
Shortlisted
Wendy Osmond, ‘The Making of Midnight Oil: Exhibition design and the translation of rock music from stage to museum’, (University of New South Wales)
Abstract
The ways in which museums construct and negotiate visitor experience are being challenged by expanding and converging modes of spectatorship and representation. This thesis models the relationship between live performance and its exhibition through an examination of the recently emerged genre of the rock music exhibition. The study explores historical antecedents, contemporary practices and explanatory models relating to this phenomenon, arguing that while museums continue to be gathering places for shared encounters and immersive spectatorship, design choices for modes of representation are subject to rapid changes in sound and imaging technologies, and associated meanings of fidelity. Exhibition development practices in museums lack a shared language that accounts for the changing paradigms of knowledge production driving the popular music exhibition phenomenon, meaning that new approaches are required from designers.
A case study analysis of the travelling exhibition The Making of Midnight Oil (2014–2017) examines one such project from my designer-researcher’s perspective. Interviews with members of the creative team in different venues, analyses of visitor contributions and design documentation, and a reflexive approach to the theory-practice nexus produce a granular account of the mediation of experience from production to reception. The rock exhibition is examined as a site of negotiable discourses of liveness, authenticity and power, in which design is a key agent of meaning-making. A blended social semiotic framework, newly applied to exhibition design, is used to describe the re-presentation of source phenomena in this emblematic multimodal space. The outcome is an explanatory model of possible responses to the challenge of mediating liveness in the museum, in which exhibition experience is modelled as a dialogic co-construction of gradable meanings between members of a multidisciplinary team, visitors, and institutional and social contexts that are distributed across on-site, off-site, and online places. By identifying how different design choices select certain truth criteria for fidelity of representation, this thesis provides a shared design lexicon of broadened choices for the mediation of live events: a re-imagining of the exhibition design brief as a Modality question. It is designed to foster increased understanding and cross-modal experimentation in interdisciplinary creative teams.