A Naked Lunch with the Modernists: Painting as Practice

This thesis project intersects between both formal and creative writing styles that explore the potential of the written language to generate and promote material practice. Contextualizing contemporary painting both art historically and opening it up to broader range of influences such as memory systems and creative writing, all help to support my notion of painting as an open thinking model that acts as an oblique reply to both the everyday and art history. The thesis traces the reductive Modernist agenda with a particular focus on Australian art history, Dadaist diagrams and Modernist painting from 1958 to 1965; as an enquiry into the semiotics of gesture and the narrative potential of mark making. Working towards Post Modernism and how this has opened up the creative possibilities of painting now outside a critical and stylistic agenda. Through intersecting existing historical practices with more contemporary painters, I aim to suggest that painting is a practice that frequently looks to the past for answers, which subsequently leads my enquiry into various modes of appropriation Key notions through out the text are painting as a diagram and network, with Cezanne’s technique of ‘Passage shape,’ which I argue has had transitive effect throughout the course of modern art up to more contemporary practices such as Jutta Koether, who enacts the behavioral passage between objects in a range of multidisciplinary crossovers. This leads the enquiry into the transitive potential of animating these passage spaces with the semiotics of gesture and mark making.