Like Something Different: A Farfetched Inquiry Into Art and Agency

This thesis research is comprised of artworks that are concerned with the processes by which art objects are delimited in terms of both their creation and their reception. My conception of objects is informed by Karen Barad’s agential realism, which understands reality to be constructed not of ‘things’, but as a result of the way that various forms of agency enact ‘cuts’ upon entangled phenomena. Objects in my practice are therefore defined by surfaces which are reconfigurable; in my work I seek to render them in as much complexity as possible, in a manner inspired by Walter Benjamin’s ruinous 'Arcades Project'. My conception of agency is mimetic and linked to the gaze, and draws on Rennie Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. Iterating on and in some ways critiquing appropriation art and institutional critique, my work draws on ideas of the copy, the commodity, and the gaze to enact or depict the complex surfaces that define art. Two works are described in terms of the surfaces that define their possibility, definition, source, and audience. While 'Manual' is an attempt to capture the source of aesthetic choice, taste, and agency, 'Bob Rennie Painting' addresses audience and reception as surfaces or defining limits of the work. 'Bob Rennie Painting' evokes a strange, hybrid art world, one which blurs the line between mutually exclusive audiences. Both of these works seek to render contradiction, or to glimpse the possibility of something simultaneously being what it is not.