The Art of Being a Fan: Complicity and Criticality in Contemporary Art and Fandom

THE ART OF BEING A FAN: COMPLICITY AND CRITICALITY IN

CONTEMPORARY ART AND FANDOM

Daniel McKewen Bachelor of Fine Arts (Honours) (QUT)

Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Visual Arts

Creative Industries Faculty

Queensland University of Technology

2013

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Keywords

art; fandom; artists; fans; complicity; criticality; bricolage; postproduction; link-

making; digital; video art; installation; creative practice; practice-led research;

performative; popular culture; screen-based culture; politics; dissensus; affect; play;

Drucker; Hills; Bourriaud; Rancière; Gordon; Breitz; Huyghe; Pfieffer; McCoy

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Abstract

This practice-led research project aims to use contemporary art processes and

concepts of fandom to construct a space for the critical and creative exploration of

the relationship between them. Much of the discourse addressing the intersection of

these spaces over the last three decades tends to treat art and fan studies as separate

areas of critical and theoretical research. There has also been very little consideration

of the critical interface that art practice and fandom share in their engagement with

one another – or how the artist as fan might creatively exploit this relationship.

Approaching these issues through a practice-led methodology that combines studio

based explorations and traditional modes of research, the project aims to demonstrate

how my ‘fannish’ engagements with popular culture can generate new responses to,

and understandings of, the relationship between fandom, affect and visual art.

The research acts as a performative and creative investigation of fandom as I

document the complicit tendencies that arise out of my affective relationship with

pop cultural artefacts. It does this through appropriating and reconfiguring content

from film, television and print media, to create digital video installations aimed at

engendering new experiences and critical interpretations of screen culture. This

approach promotes new possibilities for creative engagements with art and popular

culture, and these are framed through the lens of what I term the digital-bricoleur.

The research will be primarily contextualised by examining other artists’ practices as

well as selected theoretical frameworks that traverse my investigative terrain. The

key artists that are discussed include Douglas Gordon, Candice Brietz, Pierre

Huyghe, Paul Pfieffer, and Jennifer and Kevin McCoy. The theoretical developments

of the project are drawn from a pluralistic range of ideas ranging from Johanna

Drucker’s discussion of critical complicity in contemporary art, Matt Hills’

discussion of subjectivity in fandom and academia, Nicolas Bourriaud’s discussion

of Postproduction art practices, and Jacques Rancière’s ideas about aesthetics and

politics.

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The methodology and artworks developed over the course of this project will also

demonstrate how digital-bricolage leads to new understandings of the relationships

between contemporary art and entertainment. The research aims to exploit these

apparently contradictory positions to generate a productive site for rethinking the

relationship between the creative and critical possibilities of art and fandom. The

outcomes of the research consists of a body of artworks – 75% – that demonstrate

new contributions to knowledge, and an exegetical component – 25% – that acts to

reflect on, analyse and critically contextualise the practice-led findings.

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Table of Contents

Keywords ................................................................................................................................................... i Abstract .................................................................................................................................................... ii Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................................... i List of Figures ......................................................................................................................................... ii List of Supplementary Material ............................................................................................................ iii Statement of Original Authorship ......................................................................................................... iv Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................. v

Chapter 1: Introduction ............................................................................................. 1 Chapter 2: Methodology ............................................................................................ 7 Interpretive Paradigm .............................................................................................................. 7

Postproduction, and Digital-Bricolage ......................................................................................... 7 Link-making ............................................................................................................................... 10 Digital-Bricolage, Postproduction, and Politics ......................................................................... 13 Politics and Dissensus ................................................................................................................ 15 Digital Bricolage, Postproduction, and open-endedness ............................................................ 18

Practice-Led Research Methodology .................................................................................... 20 Bricolage ... ................................................................................................................................ 23

Chapter 3: Contextual Review ................................................................................. 27 Theoretical Contexts .............................................................................................................. 27

Complicity and Criticality .......................................................................................................... 28 Complicity as Practice ................................................................................................................ 32 Fandom ...... ................................................................................................................................ 36 Henry Jenkins – Textual Poachers .............................................................................................. 36 Matt Hills – Fandom and Academia ........................................................................................... 38 Subjectivity and Affect ............................................................................................................... 41 Play and Transitional Objects ..................................................................................................... 44 Affective Play, Intersubjectivity, and Anxiety ........................................................................... 47 The performative practices of Fandom ....................................................................................... 51

Key Contexts of Contemporary Visual Art Practice ............................................................. 52 Douglas Gordon .......................................................................................................................... 52 Candice Breitz ............................................................................................................................ 54 Pierre Huyghe ............................................................................................................................. 55 Jennifer and Kevin McCoy ......................................................................................................... 58 Paul Pfeiffer ................................................................................................................................ 60 Andy Warhol et. al. ..................................................................................................................... 62

Chapter 4: Creative Practice ................................................................................... 65 Creative Works ....................................................................................................................... 65

Slow down mischa ...................................................................................................................... 66 Every face on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995-2008 ....................................................... 67 The passage of indeterminacy in the intensification of being .................................................... 78 Running Men .............................................................................................................................. 82 Top Ten Box Office Blockbusters of All Time, in Dollars ........................................................ 87 Conditions of compromise and failure ....................................................................................... 92

Chapter 5: Conclusion .............................................................................................. 97 Reference List .......................................................................................................... 101

Bibliography ............................................................................................................ 107 Supplementary Material ........................................................................................ 131

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List of Figures

Figure 2.1. Untitled (after Steven and John), 2012, stills from digital video, 2:01 mins ..................................................... 12

Figure 3.1. Vanessa Beecroft, Untitled (VB35), 1999, Silkscreen color print, 50.8 x 71.1cm. ................................................ 33

Figure 3.2. Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Ophelia), 2001, Digital C-print, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. ...................................................... 33

Figure 3.3. Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho (detail), 1993, 24 hour video, dimensions vary. ......................................................... 53

Figure 3.4. Candice Breitz, Mother + Father (detail), 2005, twelve-channel installation, 13:15 mins and 11 mins duration ........... 54

Figure 3.5. Pierre Huyghe, The Third Memory (detail), 1999, 2 channel beta digital video, 9:46 mins ............................................... 57

Figure 3.6. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Every Shot, Every Episode, 2000 ........... 59

Figure 3.7. Paul Pfeiffer, Still from Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon), 1999, digital video loop, DVD player, miniature projector & metal armature, 7.6 x 10cm ............................. 61

Figure 3.8. Paul Pfeiffer, The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle) (detail), 2001, digital video loop, LCD monitor, DVD player, and metal armature, 15.24 x 17.78 x 152.4 cm .................................................... 62

Figure 3.9. Jeremy Blake, 1906 (stills), 2003, from the Winchester trilogy, DVD with sound, 21-minute continuous loop .................................... 62

Figure 4.1. slow down mischa, 2007, stills from digital video, 3:00 mins ............ 66 Figure 4.2. every face on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995-2008,

2009-2011, two-channel video installation, infinite loop ................... 68 Figure 4.3. Installation diagram of The Art of Being a Fan,

The Block, QUT, 28-30 March 2012 .................................................. 74 Figure 4.4. The passage of indeterminacy in the intensification of being,

2011-, single-channel video installation with 2.1 sound, 48 mins, installation view ................................................................... 79

Figure 4.5. Running Men, 2008-, three-channel video installation, infinite loop, installation view ............................................................. 83

Figure 4.6. Top Ten Box Office Blockbusters of All Time, in Dollars, 2009, ten-channel video installation with sound, infinite duration, installation view .................................................................................. 88

Figure 4.7. Conditions of compromise and failure, 2011-2012, mixed media, dimensions vary, installation view ............................... 92

Figure 4.8. Conditions of compromise and failure, 2011-2012, mixed media, dimensions vary, detail view ........................................ 93

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List of Supplementary Material

The ePrints version of this thesis includes the exegetical component only. A supplementary DVD of selected works is included at the rear of the printed version of the exegesis, or can be requested from the author. These, and other selected video works can also be found at www.danielmckewen.com and http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen. Works discussed in exegesis:

• Untitled (after Steven and John), 2012, single-channel HD video installation with stereo sound, excerpt from infinite loop. http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/untitledstevenjohn

• slow down mischa, 2006, single-channel SD video, 3:00 minutes. http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/slowdownmischa

• every face on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995-2008, 2009-2012, two-channel HD video installation with stereo sound, documentation excerpt from infinite loop. http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/everyface

• The passage of indeterminacy in the intensification of being, 2011- , single-channel HD video installation with stereo sound, documentation excerpt from 48:49 minutes. http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/passage

• Running Men, 2008- , three-channel HD video installation, documentation excerpt from infinite loop. http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/runningmen

• running cary, 2008, single-channel HD video, excerpt from infinite loop. http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/runningcarytext

• Top Ten Box Office Blockbusters of All Time, in Dollars, 2010- , ten-channel SD video installation with stereo sound, documentation excerpt from infinite loop. http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/topten

Other selected works:

• something 2.0, 2008, single-channel HD video, 1:44 minute excerpt from infinite loop. http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/something

• me as al, you as bobby, me as bobby, you as al, 2008 two-channel HD video installation with stereo sound, 1:34 minute excerpt from infinite loop. http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/bobbyandal

• Untitled, 2011, single-channel HD video with stereo sound, 1:18 minute excerpt from infinite loop. http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/untitled

• Close-ups (grid), 2012, single-channel HD video with stereo sound, 2:56 minutes. http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/closeupgrid

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Statement of Original Authorship

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

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

best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously

published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature:

Date: 15 / 10 / 2012

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The!Art!of!Being!a!Fan:!Complicity!and!Criticality!in!Contemporary!Art!and!Fandom! v!

Acknowledgements

This PhD is the product of countless hours of work, not just my own, but also the

untold hours of talking, listening, reading and watching by my supervisors, peers,

friends and family. To say I could not have done this PhD without their support is to

severely understate the matter.

To my supervisors, Mark Webb (principle) and Dr Mark Pennings (associate), I

cannot even begin to express enough gratitude in these few words. In all aspects of

their supervision, they have gone above and beyond the call of duty. Their wisdom,

advice, encouragement, expertise and, above all, patience, have been absolutely

essential both to me personally, and to my research. I am unable to thank them

enough.

There are numerous peers and QUT staff whose assistance and understanding has

been extremely valuable throughout the project. For their patience and support, my

thanks go to Channon Goodwin, Anita Holtsclaw, Joseph Breikers, Tim Woodward,

Anastasia Booth, Kate Woodcroft, Courtney Coombs, as well as the entire extended

Boxcopy ARI group. My thanks also to Dr Dan Mafe, Dr Grant Stevens, Charles

Robb, Dr Andrew McNamara, Dr Courtney Pedersen, Dr Rachael Haynes, Lubi

Thomas, Jacob Broomhall, Blair Walkinshaw and Nigel Oram.

To my parents, Rod and Robyn, I want to extend endless thanks for encouraging me

every step of the way in my development as a creative being, and for instilling in me

their love for life-long learning.

Finally, I want to thank my wife Maegan, whose faith, support and belief in me are

what make the difference in my life everyday. Without her, this study would not

have happened. For that, and for her, I am eternally grateful.

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Chapter!1:!Introduction! 1!

Chapter 1: Introduction

This research project is focused on the ways that visual arts practices can both

creatively consume and critically respond to popular culture. It was born out of a

desire to better understand the way that my affective engagements with pop culture

were influencing the development of my art practice. I hoped that by testing out and

closely examining different approaches to making art I could make sense of how and

why my habitual excursions into the endless stream of celebrity and media culture

were pervading the content and context of my art-making. I wanted to unpack what

this meant for my practice, to discover new ways of making work and, more broadly,

to think about visual art practices that are informed by a synthesis of art and

entertainment.

At the beginning of this project, and coming on the heels of my Honours project, I

thought that I made video art about celebrity culture, and that I processed this topic

through my expertise in new media technologies. However, through undertaking this

research project I have come to understand that my practice is in many ways much

more complicated than I originally considered it to be.

This doctoral research has contained a wide-ranging and diverse series of creative

and critical explorations that have taken place across myriads of networked ideas,

screen-based experiences and conceptual puzzles. All of these explorative elements

circle around the questions central to my research practice: ‘What does it mean to be

a fan?’, ‘What does it mean to be an artist?’, and ‘What does it mean to be both?’.

These questions have been addressed principally through practice-led research, so

developing a methodology that can adequately define and articulate the findings of

the project has been central to the research outcomes. As an artist – and an avid

consumer of popular culture – I wanted to explore what insights are produced when

traversing the intersection between art and entertainment. I was also perplexed that

my ‘fannish’ compulsions seemed in conflict with the critical engagements that I

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2! Chapter!1:!Introduction!

believed art-making should have with the popular culture. I was concerned that I

could not be critical if I was seduced by my own desires, and I was curious about

whether the tension between these concepts could be constructive in the process of

making art. I was also more interested in examining these ideas through the lens of

my creative practice rather than as pure academic research because I thought this

would better open up new connections between the fields of art and entertainment.

By creatively and critically exploring the activities of my fandom I aimed to discover

new ways for thinking about its relationship to art on a conceptual and practical

level. My artistic response to this interactive process, which is described as an

ongoing process of link-making, is also reflected in the composition of this exegesis.

Just as the practice-led outcomes are formed through a series of connective

processes, so too are the various chapters of this document. Accordingly, the

conceptual, formal, material, technical and affectual connections made through the

research are essential to how this project can be expressed and understood. So, while

the project’s aims are more appropriately reflected in the practice-led methodology

and creative outcomes, the exegetical component serves to document and elaborate

on those aspects of the research, as well as reflecting on the outcomes of the practice-

led research. This document is structured in such a way as to lay out the various

conceptual and theoretical terrains first, in the Interpretive Paradigm and Contextual

Review sections. This has been done in order to then more closely align and

emphasise how the methodology and creative outcomes that follow have developed

from links made with other art and art practices. It is also structured this way because

contemporary art practice is the primary field of research and knowledge to which

the project contributes.

This project originated in my creative practice during undergraduate and honours

studies. During this time I struggled to identify what I felt should be the focus and

purpose of my art-making. Indeed, the very way that I engaged with the subject

matter of pop culture was at odds with what I thought art had to do. This was

especially problematic because it confronted my seemingly un-critical experience as

something of a pop culture ‘junkie’. I had thought that art was somehow in

opposition to popular culture, rather than (what I now understand it to be) a space for

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questioning that assumption. I had misunderstood art’s role in helping me to (as

Johanna Drucker puts it) “imagine otherwise” (2005, 6). While I did have this

awareness on one level – understanding an art practice as speculative and open-

ended, and of raising more questions than answers – this observation at first failed to

make an impact on my practice. Only as this research project unfolded was I able to

fully absorb the procedural and conceptual operations of my practice. This reflection

and analysis enabled me to question earlier assumptions about art’s purpose in the

world – an idea of oppositional-criticality that I had inherited from a Modernist

avant-gardist idea of art, and which had become my ‘blind spot’, so to speak. By

more carefully thinking about this issue, I opened up new spaces of working and

making, and produced more considered artistic engagements. This involved a

continuing dialogue with the conceptual and formal aspects of the subject matter as

documented here, and will continue long after the final submission of my doctorate.

What I have now realised is that this research has offered new possibilities for what

might constitute an art practice – one that folds art and fandom together in their

conceptual and material engagements.

The research project has also allowed me to ‘come out’ as a fan, and has enabled me

to realise the creative potential that inhabiting the position of artist as fan activates.

The media and cultural studies theorist Matt Hills has been central to identifying and

building on this idea. His analysis of fandom is based on a transmedia and

multimedia idea of a fan’s consumption (2002, 2). He argues that fans that participate

in a wide-ranging and avid consumption of media culture, particularly through

screen-based culture, enact “a form of cultural creativity” (2002, 90). Through the

methodology discussed in Chapter Two I develop this model of fandom into what I

call the connoisseur-fan – as an authority on contemporary visual practices who is

also an aficionado of pop culture. In this chapter I elaborate on how my consumption

of both cultural phenomena is wide-ranging across media and genres, but how my

selective, close reading conforms to my particular (and what I consider to be

subjectively discerning) interests. While I am compulsively fascinated by the

Hollywood entertainment industry, I specifically distinguish my particular interest in

it in relation to certain measures of artistry and/or critical success and acclaim,

production values, the craft of acting and even box office success. These are highly

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4! Chapter!1:!Introduction!

subjective interests and are also linked to the conceptual and formal concerns of the

artists and art practices to which I have always been attracted. The Contextual

Review will further demonstrate how these artists address the intersection of art and

entertainment from the position of a specialist practitioner – the connoisseur-fan.

This in turn becomes the parallel site from which methodology of the digital-

bricoleur develops as practice-led research.

The zone of fannish connoisseurship – from which I habitually consume and

carefully select popular culture, then transform and recontextualise it through

creative practice – effectively outlines the research process embedded in the project.

As will be discussed in Chapter Two, this habitual watching, surfing, listening and

reading of popular culture is almost entirely enabled and informed by the internet,

and this site constitutes the nexus between my activities as a fan and an artist. This

process involves encountering unexpected information through the process of hyper-

linking and pursuing certain obsessions in order to make a subtle and informed

examination of the conceptual and formal construction of culture. As part of this

process, I am repeatedly compiling and conceptually connecting together a library of

audio/visual and textual materials that feeds into my art-making processes. As

previously suggested, this method of making is what I will refer to throughout the

document as link-making. As an approach to practice, this idea of associative process

or activity might appear axiomatic to any form of signification. Nonetheless, this

document aims to demonstrate how important it has become as a valuable strategic

device for me to make sense of the often conflicting elements I encounter in the

research and practice that make up my art-making. Although this connective method

is not necessarily evident in the creative outcomes, it is fundamental to the making

process at a conceptual, affectual and practical level. This methodology forms the

focus of my creative process, and it constitutes the primary content and context that

forms the space of my practice. It is this connective, consumption-driven and

creative methodology that forms the basis of the research project.

The notion of the connoisseur-fan also applies to many contemporary artists that I

am fascinated by, and who have informed my thinking around art practice. Douglas

Gordon was crucial for me in identifying and framing my artistic practice through

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fandom. In describing the creation of his epic 24 Hour Psycho (1993) – a slow

reformatting of Hitchcock’s classic film – the artist situates the artwork “somewhere

between the academy and the bedroom”, and has explained how the work grew out

of simply playing with a VCR-taped copy of this icon of popular culture, and

experiencing an absorbed fascination with it (quoted in Brown 2004, 24). Gordon’s

admiration and fixation with this work (also evident in the practices of Candice

Breitz and Paul Pfieffer) encouraged me to explore how concepts of fandom could

operate as a creative practice. These artists work largely by appropriating and

recontextualising existing popular culture as material for their artworks. They also

combine this approach to making with a playful interest in the technology, media and

mechanisms that disseminate popular material. I identify strongly with their use of

their own fannish interests to make art, and they provide much of the existing

creative and conceptual territory that this research project develops and extends on.

Before addressing the issues, artists, and practices that were seminal to development

of the research outcomes, I will first discuss the interpretive and methodological

contexts of my project. I do this to explain the various theoretical and creative

paradigms that have been central to identifying and constructing my artistic

activities, which – as I have already suggested – are framed through the figure of the

digital-bricoleur. This position/identity has developed out of the various formal and

conceptual connections that have been grafted together over the course of this

research. The Contextual Review in Chapter Three will explain how the various

trajectories of these theoretical explorations have come together to shape the

methodology developed in the project – and contextualise the practice within

contemporary art. Following this, the Creative Practice chapter will elaborate on how

my art practice functions – how the conceptual, technical, material and formal

elements are combined to construct the artworks that result from the research.

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Chapter!2:!Methodology! 7!

Chapter 2: Methodology

Interpretive Paradigm

There is an inherent overlap between the interpretive paradigm and the practice-led

methodology I have instituted in this research project. The former is considered to be

the broader framework and creative territory that informs the practice-led research

structure that this project uses, whereas the latter defines the practical processes and

perspectives developed through this theoretical structure. Here I will discuss the

larger conceptual and contextual fields from which the methodology has been

constructed. This interpretive paradigm will emphasise a focus on the ideas of the

curator/critic Nicholas Bourriaud in his work Postproduction. His writing about

Postproduction as a mode of creative practice has been invaluable for me when

developing and refining the idea of the digital-bricoleur. What follows is an

extensive description of how I came to this figure, and details about how it informs

the development of my methodology over the course of the project.

Postproduction, and Digital-Bricolage

The term postproduction has been adapted and extended by Bourriaud from its

original use, which is to describe the film and television industry’s workflow model

that follows production. Bourriaud uses the term as an analogy to describe a creative

attitude and conceptual methodology that is exemplified in the work of artists such as

Pierre Huyghe and Liam Gillick. His use of the term is very relevant to how I have

developed the formal and conceptual framework of this project – and to my interest

in contemporary art as a whole. That is because it suggests an idea of art-making

which privileges a speculative and idiosyncratic linking together of pre-existing

concepts, media and methods of making. In a way, I consider it as a contemporary

reworking of the ‘assisted readymade’ – as a way to appropriate, play with and

reconsider the relationships between art and life. Bourriaud’s discussion of

Postproduction could be also considered a contemporary re-imagining of Michel De

Certeau’s notion of everyday practice, in that it describes purposeful and personal

methods of constructing new meanings and uses from the navigation and

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8! Chapter!2:!Methodology!

consumption of existing culture. Bourriaud’s ideas will be further explored in

relation to my experiences of fandom and bricolage in the Methodology and Creative

Practice sections, so what follows is an overview of the relevance of these ideas to

the project as a whole.

Bourriaud argues that artists like Huyghe and Gillick are very sensitive to the

symbolic significances that screen-based culture generates both on and off the

internet. These semionauts, as he casts them, are consumers given agency – they

“surf on a network of signs... insert[ing] our forms on existing lines” (2002, 13).

Artists working this way construct new symbolic relationships between physical and

screen-based spaces by surfing through, and along, these sites, and by making

innovative connections between them. The new interpretations of these symbolic

relationships become artworks (forms) that are re-combined back into this network of

signs as a kind of feedback loop between art and pop culture. This process of

referencing, restructuring, emphasising or re-imagining existing content and/or

contexts creates new forms of knowledge and ways for thinking about this network.

Importantly, through my own experiences as a fan and artist working with digital

media, I strongly identify with this approach to making, and this was part of what led

to the formation of the idea of the digital-bricoleur.

Postproduction practices, as defined by Bourriaud, also entail an informed and

careful navigation across the different spaces and forms of popular culture. This

process, he maintains, represents a critically engaging activity by the artist. Pierre

Huyghe’s video work, The Third Memory (2000), appropriates and re-enacts scenes

from the 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon – itself based on a real bank robbery. This

work is a good example of an informed ‘feedback loop’ and represents the way

postproduction practices can critically examine and creatively re-interpret the

fictional and factual spaces of cultural forms. In this work, Huyghe screens the movie

Dog Day Afternoon alongside the actual bank robber’s own recollection and re-

enactment of events, performed, as it were, in a studio-based set. This juxtaposition

of actual and represented events can be seen as an attempt to find and explore

moments of spatial and historical connection and disconnection between competing

narratives. By displaying different versions of the same event and mapping the

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terrain of filmic ‘memory’ as it aligns with the ‘truth’ of actual memory, the

vicissitudes of both narratives become very apparent, and new considerations of

them can be made.

Postproduction practices also inform and give shape to the idea of the connoisseur-

fan. In Sweet Dreams: criticality and complicity in contemporary art practice (2005)

Joanna Drucker examines the practices of artists who negotiate their relationship

between popular culture and art in a particular manner:

[A]rtists in large part are working in recognition of their relations of

compromise and contradiction, their more self-consciously positive – or

nuanced and complex – engagements with the culture industry. (2005, 8)

For me, the figure of the digital-bricoleur occupies a similar place between

historically competing cultural systems without the constraints of adhering to any

particular position. They do this essentially through the process or methodology of

making informed connections between cultural forms: from the pieces of a film to be

edited together, to the choice and arrangements of objects or images to be displayed.

In this way, my own practice connects concepts and forms in order to develop a

greater critical awareness and understanding of their symbolic potential. This, in

turn, enables me to develop a closer, more ‘nuanced’, reading of the social, political

and cultural phenomena and contexts I am working with.

By adopting the identity of the digital-bricoleur I have been able to understand my

practice as an ongoing process of poetic and analytical link-making. This process

facilitates the critical re-evaluation of nuanced and complex viewpoints that exist in

broader social and political issues that are implicit in any cultural activity. It is also

the lens through which I view my making processes as a connoisseur-fan. It connects

both parts of my practice (cultural consumption and creative production) and gives

me the freedom to operate as an artist/fan. The digital-bricoleur becomes the

interpretive agent through which I carry out a more refined critical engagement with

popular culture in the content and contexts of the creative practice.

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Link-making

As I suggested above, Bourriaud’s ideas about Postproduction in contemporary

visual arts practices have informed my own development of the figure of the digital-

bricoleur as a mode of socially and politically engaged practice. His description of

postproduction as a way of art-making that “invent[s] paths through culture” (2002,

12) resonates strongly with my own approach to making. He also argues that these

new practices run counter to traditional ideas of the ‘original’ work of art, or

Modernist avant-gardist oppositional critique. Instead, as I mentioned earlier,

postproduction in art follows the trajectory of Duchamp’s readymades, and is built

out of informed play with existing cultural artefacts (2002, 57). Bourriaud also

maintains that the creative recontextualising and remaking of cultural forms opens

them up to social, economic and political critique by creating new understandings:

Postproduction artists invent new uses for works, including audio or visual

forms of the past, within their own constructions. But they also re-edit

historical or ideological narratives, inserting the elements that compose them

into alternative scenarios. (2002, 45)

Bourriaud suggests that by playing with these scenarios we can become more

critically aware of alternative possibilities for those things that are presented for our

consumption (2002, 50). The postproduction artist can respond to existing dominant

narratives and stereotypes by disrupting and realigning conventional understandings

of lived experience. This also runs parallel to the aims and ambitions of the digital-

bricoleur – and is analogous to the creative engagements of the connoisseur-fan. The

connoisseur-fan and the digital-bricoleur make connective links across a network of

cultural forms in idiosyncratic ways that privilege both subjective and intersubjective

readings of culture. As I discussed in Chapter One, as a connoisseur-fan my cultural

consumption closely reads the conceptual and formal constructions of pop culture.

As a digital-bricoleur I embrace this highly selective process of close reading of

culture (connoisseur-fandom) and combine it with a link-making connective

consumption to develop a specific methodology for art-making. In this way, the

practice incorporates both very considered (connoisseurship) and more aleatory

(bricolage) approaches to the production of art. I combine postproduction strategies

and my activities as a fan to discover new possibilities and symbolic reinterpretations

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for cultural artefacts. In this way, the project unites my roles as connoisseur-fan and

digital-bricoleur to examine the creative and critical potential of idiosyncratic and

playful link-making within culture.

As stated in the introductory chapter, this link-making strategy in my practice is one

that, while not necessarily evident in the creative outcomes, is fundamental to my art-

making processes on numerous levels. It has developed out of the connections I

make from surfing the internet’s seemingly infinite breadth and scope of data, forms

and signs. Just as Bourriaud suggests, I also use search engines as a way to create

unique pathways across this network and then ‘map’ the information from these

nomadic excursions into ever growing archives. Using curated music playlists as an

example, he argues that the act of choice can become a creative practice in and of

itself, and that

to listen to records becomes work in itself, which diminishes the dividing

line between reception and practice, producing new cartographies of

knowledge. (2002, 13)

This idea (and a YouTube playlist, carefully formulated RSS feed, or a Tumblr

account, etc., could be easily substituted for music playlists) of ‘cultural curation’ as

an act of link-making is important because it helps map new ‘cartographies’ – new

maps for seeing what these connections might develop into. In the case of my

practice, this could be as simple as watching one linked video on YouTube after the

next; as obsessive (and linear) as poring over every page of Vanity Fair magazine; as

idiosyncratic as watching, listening to and simultaneously interacting with multiple

streams of video, television, music or video gaming; or as speculative as reading and

‘chaining’ related link after related link in Wikipedia. These habitual excursions into

popular culture and the internet are the origins of practice that this project puts into

action, and which it tests in order to create playful, creative and critical knowledge as

artworks.

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Figure 2.1. Untitled (after Steven and John), 2012, stills from digital video, 2:01 mins

This process of link-making is the primary method through which to connect the

spaces of fan and artist while activating new conceptual approaches to producing

artistic content. For example, the work Untitled (after Steven and John) (see

supplementary DVD or http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/untitledstevenjohn) was

developed out of my daily RSS feed reading, which led to a news article about

Steven Spielberg’s upcoming film Robopocalypse. This then prompted me to search

for and watch a YouTube clip from his film A.I. Artificial Intelligence – because of

the shared subject matter, and as a way to remember a favourite scene. Re-watching

this prompted me to link to the Wikipedia article about the film, which discusses

Stanley Kubrick’s involvement in its development. Kubrick abandoned the project to

make Eyes Wide Shut, and this led me to watching YouTube videos of clips from that

film – and I then Googled it to locate production photographs from this film. This

search yielded a particularly disquieting Time magazine cover photograph of a naked

(and robotic looking) Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, which I then archived for

future appropriation.

When later reflecting on connections between Tom Cruise, Steven Spielberg and

A.I., I remembered a previously watched video essay that included all these elements.

It focussed on Spielberg’s use of the cinematic close-up, and, in response, I felt

compelled to play with the close-up faces via the super-imposition of simple shapes.

After some experimentation I began to see a connection with John Baldessari’s

collages of dots-over-faces. Through another search I was then able to reference

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Baldessari’s common colour choices, and the work resolved itself into a sort of

homage to both Spielberg and Baldessari; hence the work’s title. This example

emphasises the primacy and efficacy of link-making behaviour. While this

convoluted process is not evident in the finished work, it is a crucial strategy for me

to act out in order to create such a work. As with Bourriaud’s ideas, this apparently

simple idiosyncratic and speculative link-making approach to practice – entirely

enabled by the internet – is essential for me to develop new ‘cartographies’ that can

engender new creative outcomes in ways that I will discuss further in the following

sections and chapters.

Digital-Bricolage, Postproduction, and Politics

There is also a political dimension to Bourriaud's concept of postproduction, and this

can be understood by considering the relationship between aesthetics and politics as

espoused by Jacques Rancière. In particular, I am interested in Rancière’s notion of

dissensus, which aligns itself with the political dimensions of my postproduction

activities. Rancière also radically repositions the historical relationship between art

and politics, and has allowed me to think through the complications that arise in the

complicit and critical facets of the relationship between art and entertainment.

Rancière has proposed that art and politics are not autonomous experiences and that

these concepts can be ‘re-distributed’, and such ideas are important to the way in

which I locate my digital-bricoleur activities that operate in the ‘regime’ or common

territory of aesthetics and politics. By discussing these ideas I want to demonstrate

how creative practices can potentially activate new and subtle ways of understanding

and expressing our experience of the world, and how they can instigate new

approaches to creative critique.

As stated, Postproduction practices utilise the processes of decontextualising and

recontextualising existing cultural forms to construct re-interpretations of culture.

Bourriaud suggests that through doing this the postproduction artist engages with the

political dimensions and systems of cultural production by scrambling the

“boundaries between consumption and production” (2002, 13). In this way, these

practices can question binary conceptions of passive audiences or active pop culture

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makers that were proposed by theorists such as Theodor Adorno. Adorno’s ideas

were framed by Marxist ideas about the ‘use’ and ‘exchange’ values of cultural

forms. However, as Matt Hills’ description of fan behaviour indicates, instead of

being simplistically framed as either passively consuming subjects (the “commodity-

completist”) or actively producing agents (the “anti-commercial idealogue”) fan (and

postproduction) practices can represent a “dialectic of value” between these two

conceptions (2002, 30-34). Similarly, the digital-bricoleur renegotiates the

engagement with culture in ways that redefine cultural value within a contradictory

intersection between passivity and activity. Bourriaud’s postproduction artist

(digital-bricoleur) reassesses this passive/active dialectic by building on De

Certeau's ideas where the consumer in capitalist systems can carry out the bricoleur’s

tactics to “use, manipulate, and divert” cultural forms (1984, 30). Bourriaud even

suggests that certain activities of postproduction become acts of “micropirating”

(2002, 18). As an artist and fan I strongly identify with this refusal to submit to the

role of passive consumer in the cultural industries of globalised capitalism.

Postproduction’s tactics as employed by artists can flexibly negotiate the

compromises and contradictions of the cultural industries. These approaches to

producing artwork reflect Jacques Rancière’s idea of re-negotiating the complexities

of the relationship between aesthetics and politics. I think of Bourriaud’s use of the

terms “clandestine micro-bricolages” and “micropirating” (2002, 18) as resembling

the kind of politicised activity outlined by Rancière. Rancière argues that these acts

of artistic intervention enable “dissensus” and the “manifestations of gaps” in the

“policed” order, and such actions can “modify the coordinates of the sensible”

(quoted in Carnevale and Kelsey 2007, 259). It is in this way that politics is

aesthetics, “in that it makes visible what had been excluded from a perceptual field,

and that it makes audible what used to be inaudible” (1999, 36).

Before elaborating on these ideas I want to clarify that I do not think of the digital-

bricoleur or postproduction practices as being avant-gardist in their approach to

critiquing popular culture. Like Drucker’s observations that many art practices are

self-consciously aware of their complicity within contemporary socio-political and

cultural economies, I think that the contemporary relationship between art and

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politics is very nuanced and complicated in a globalised culture. Accordingly, the

methodological approach to my practice – as informed by Rancière – seeks to work

in localised occupations to shift various ‘co-ordinates’ and understandings within a

broader terrain of the ‘sensible’ that shares the spaces of art and politics (quoted in

Carnevale and Kelsey 2007, 259). This is how I conceptualise and contextualise my

art-making processes and outputs. They form part of a larger scheme of artists who

work across the terrain of the ‘sensible’ – the common ground of the creative and the

political – and make observations and suggestions to re-order and re-assess assumed

knowledge claims.

Politics and Dissensus

Rancière’s reframing of art and aesthetics in terms of the ‘political’ depends on his

notion of politics as a common space of the ‘sensible’; an ordered, sanctioned, and

‘policed’ space of “the given and the possible” (Carnevale and Kelsey 2007, 259).

This ‘fabric of the sensible’ is the site in which politics and aesthetics implicate one

another, rather than operating in separate spheres, and allows for a rethinking of what

it is to be a ‘political subject’. It is important here to describe what Rancière means

by the terms ‘police order’ and politics. For him, the notion of ‘police’ frames “an

order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing… being… saying, and

that sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task”. It is

the underlying framework that governs and configures our ‘occupations’ and where

these are rightly ‘distributed’ (1999, 29). Simply put, the ‘police order’ as he frames

it, is the institutionally enforced form of governance that is common to, and generally

accepted by, most citizens – it is consensus.

The concept of politics also has a very specific meaning and intent for Rancière.

‘Political activity’ represents “an extremely determined activity antagonistic to

policing” (1999, 29). For me these activities mirror Bourriaud’s ideas of ’micro-

bricolage’ and ‘micropiracy’ as they signal, or promote, a break in what Rancière

calls the fabric of the sensible: “it makes visible what had no business being seen,

and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise” (1999, 30).

He also suggests that by opening up this site for ‘modification’ it promotes a process

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of ‘subjectification’, which becomes a ‘disidentification’ or a “removal from the

naturalness of a place” (1999, 36). It is this idea of ‘disidentification’ that I find very

relevant when thinking about the construction of my own identity and subjectivity.

This is because I think of this as developing out of my emotional engagements with

pop culture that form the content and context of my practice. These affectual

moments form a large part of my fan experience and comprise an emotional

relationship to pop culture that will be discussed further in the Contextual Review.

The introduction of this subjective affectivity is important here because it highlights

that the shift from political identity to subjectivity is not tied to the ‘natural order of

the police’, and this recognition informs my activities as a digital-bricoleur. Rancière

describes such political and artistic interventions in the police order as instances of

‘dissensus’, as

a modification of the coordinates of the sensible, a spectacle or a tonality

that replaces another… [Dissensus is] a way of reconstructing the

relationship between places and identities, spectacles and gazes, proximities

and distances (quoted in Carnevale and Kelsey 2007, 259).

I think of dissensus as a creative restructuring of the spaces of art and politics, which

is analogous to the processes of bricolage and postproduction that I have employed in

this project. The ‘reconstructive’ and ‘redistributive’ activities that Rancière

describes have the potential to be emancipatory experiences in relation to the

subjectivisation of the self as well as the reorganisation of the spaces of art-making

and its reception. The idea of initiating “a discourse where once there was only place

for noise” also resonates with the navigating, connecting and recontextualising that

my practice activates in order to clear a site for new ‘conversations’ to be heard

(1999, 30). Rancière explains artistic interventions (dissensus) as breaking free of

conventional inscriptions “within given roles, possibilities, and competences”

(Carnevale and Kelsey 2007, 259). He identifies a political practitioner as an

operator that connects and disconnects different areas, regions, identities,

functions, and capacities existing in the configuration of a given experience

– that is, in the nexus of distributions of the police order and whatever

equality is already inscribed there, however fragile and fleeting such

inscriptions may be (1999, 40).

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This idea of the digital-bricoleur as researcher moving across a terrain of ‘areas

regions, identities, functions and (importantly) capacities’ – in order to ‘redistribute’

the understandings between politics and art – is central to my project. Further, the

subjective nature of practice-led creative processes suggests that it might have the

potential to activate a space of dissensus – as a site for new thinking and

communities to arise. Rancière’s concept of dissensus, allows me as a fan and artist

to be more conscious of the connections and disconnections that might be made in

the common ‘policed’ sensible, and this exploration of gaps in the sensible creates

what Rancière calls ‘political subjectivisation’. This represents a ‘disidentification’

with the consensus of the ‘police’ order, and comes about “through a series of actions

of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given

field of experience” (1999, 35-36). It also constitutes ways in which artistic practice

develops new knowledge.

Like Bourriaud’s contention that artists develop new scenarios and narratives from

pre-existing cultural forms, Rancière advocates constructing a highly subjective and

indeterminate field for the operation of such practices. Instead of having to carry the

burden of making consciously ideological aesthetic gestures, there exists a

configuration of possibilities, a perception of the multiple alterations and

displacements… [to] free artists, curators, and other actors implicated in this

world from the atmosphere of guilt wrought by the historical mission of art.

(Carnevale and Kelsey 2007, 257)

My project embraces a freedom from the ‘historical mission’ inherited from

Enlightenment and Modernist avant-garde traditions, and explores a new cultural

orientation with its own cartographies and “topography of possibilities” (Carnevale

and Kelsey 2007, 257). Rancière’s notion of dissensus is important for establishing a

way to consider the critical possibilities that creative methodologies might generate

in the shared spaces of art and politics. Grafting these ideas across the activities of

postproduction via the digital-bricoleur allows me to carefully consider how to

engage with the aesthetic and political complications of what is, or can be

represented in, popular culture and art. These concepts frame my practice as an

exploration of ways to ‘re-distribute the sensible’ as Rancière discusses it.

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Through this discussion, I have developed the creative, critical and political potential

of the digital-bricoleur for my methodology. However, I am also testing how this

approach to practice can explore and represent a continual construction of my own

identity and subjectivity – or perhaps more precisely in Rancière’s terms, my

‘disidentification’ or subjectivisation within consensus of the ‘police order’. This

idea of identity construction will be further discussed in the context of fan studies in

the Contextual Review. It is important to acknowledge that the appropriative

practices that make up my creative explorations always enact, consciously or not, my

own ideological motivations. For example, by being fascinated with, and then re-

editing, a particular music video, I actually reflect on my reading, for instance, of

how gender is represented in these videos, and aim to create a non-didactic space for

the viewer to do the same. Or, by being curious about the capital worth of

blockbuster films and mapping this across the films I love or hate, I play a game of

sorts with their cultural significance – with how these things are measured and

assessed. So, while I want to express a nuanced response to the ideological

dimensions of pop culture, I also want the practice to generate possibilities for a

sense of dissensus to occur for the viewer. This is possible because of my position as

both an artist and fan. By this I mean that although my methods of art-making and

my fannish interests are subjective and specific to me, the prevalence of these ideas

of making and consuming means that my work can be readily shared beyond my own

experience with an audience.

Digital Bricolage, Postproduction, and open-endedness

As a way in which this approach to practice might activate new possibilities for

experiencing art, or creating “a discourse where once there was only place for noise”

(Rancière 1999, 30), I want to discuss Bourriaud’s observations about the practices

of Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno. He suggests that they refuse to accept

cultural artefacts as end-points in the construction of shared symbolic meaning. This

is because

the contemporary work of art does not position itself as the termination point

of the "creative process" (a "finished product" to be contemplated) but as a

site of navigation, a portal, a generator of activities. (2002, 13)

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This idea underlines my approach to practice – I am very aware of the highly

subjective process of constructing it, but also conscious of how the culturally shared

content it uses can be reconfigured once it is exhibited. This open-ended approach to

practice emphasises the interpretative processes of both artist and audience as they

connect and disconnect “different areas, regions, identities, functions, and capacities

existing in the configuration of a given experience” (Rancière 1999,40). This also

resonates with Rancière’s idea that artistic/political interventions can have an

emancipatory potential to initiate the process of ‘disidentification’ and a ‘topography

of possibilities’ for both the artist and the viewer (quoted in Carnevale and Kelsey

2007, 257). Rather than supporting the ‘policed’ order of a culturally or politically

authorised status quo, art practices that activate new perspectives can ‘modify the

visible’, and can offer new understandings of how politics and culture construct

identity. Artworks can also contribute to ongoing dialogue about the broader

subjective experiences of culture in general. This is the question this project has

explored – the construction of “multiple alterations and displacements” of identity

that potentially lie outside of the “police order”, and the revealing of such

possibilities to an audience (quoted in Carnevale and Kelsey 2007, 257).

This idea of shared spaces and intersubjective understandings of pop culture

experiences touches on the issues of ‘affect’ and psychoanalytical understandings of

fandom. It is important to foreground these issues before proceeding because the

development of the methodology and creative outcomes serve as evidence of these

experiences and form the majority of the research. For this reason the interpretive

paradigm is focused on theories of making, first, followed by theoretical contexts –

so bricolage is understood foremost as a material process, before being considered as

a theoretical construct. In addition, by foregrounding the recontextualising processes

of art-making as a series of purposeful, creative and critical activities, I can better

articulate how the digital-bricoleur functions and how s/he explores the terrain of fan

experience.

The subjective and intersubjective understandings of culture derived from this

approach to making share Johanna Drucker’s recognition of the nuanced and

complicit attitude that many contemporary artists have in their relationship with

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popular culture. She acknowledges the kind of complexities, contradictions, overlaps

and compromises that I experience as an artist, bricoleur, researcher and academic.

How the practice navigates the tensions of this space is central to the research aims

of the project, and will be addressed in the following Contextual Review as well as in

the discussion of the creative outcomes, in Chapter Four. The next section of the

methodology will discuss the specific practice-led methodology that I have

developed over the course of the project.

Practice-Led Research Methodology

In this section, I will discuss the practice-led methodology that I have developed over

the course of the project. I will outline the key issues and concerns that inform my

approach to making and research. This section also aims to demonstrate the

relationship between my writing and making in artistic practice. These activities are

symbiotically grafted together to creatively and critically explore the field of research

through a reflective process that is fluid and ongoing.

The primary research method of this project is practice-led; it is the principal creative

and critical methodology I employ as an artist as researcher. As a strategy for

research in creative fields it is perhaps best explained by Carole Gray in her paper

‘Inquiry through practice: developing appropriate research strategies’. She defines

practice-led research as:

Research which is initiated in practice, where questions, problems,

challenges are identified and formed by the needs of practice and

practitioners; and secondly, that the research strategy is carried out through

practice, using predominantly methodologies and specific methods familiar

to us as practitioners in the visual arts. (1996, 3)

This description articulates two key points for my use of practice-led research in this

project. Firstly, as a practitioner I identify with the way that questions, problems and

challenges come out of the habits, rituals and reflection involved in the process of

making art. Indeed this has been the primary catalyst for this research project.

Secondly, and crucially, I also identify with her insistence that the strategy of the

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research process is sustained by ongoing discoveries that arise out of artistic practice.

The combination of these two attributes is inherent in this practice-led methodology:

it is the symbiotic and chiasmatic movement between studio practice (making), and

critical reading and reflection that informs ongoing development. In these ways, the

methodology becomes a ‘conversation’ between the practical and theoretical

elements of research. The rituals of making, reading, writing and reflection operate

simultaneously and causally, and drive the practice to create new cultural forms.

As an artist as researcher this conversation relates to how subjective qualities so

often associated with fan behaviours and art-making can become defining factors for

creating new knowledge and cultural forms. By examining my interest in using

popular culture as the content and context of my practice, I can start a conversation

about the creative and critical potential of this for making artwork. Embracing a

dialogue between fan and artist enables me to discover how these orientations can be

innovative. Approaching the practice this way required shifting from an

Enlightenment, or even Modernist avant-garde sense of the artist as cultural producer

or critic, and away from late-capitalist understandings of fans as willingly complicit

consumers of populist fantasy. It meant a reassessment of these positions and led me

to reconsider the intersection of art and entertainment in contemporary culture.

In the chapter 'Practice As Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry' (Barrett

& Bolt, 2007) Brad Haseman has suggested that practice-led research lies within a

“third-space” of research. This is defined as being separate to, but with equal claims

to, knowledge within quantitative and qualitative research models (2007, 150). This

performative research paradigm takes as its founding principle that “the symbolic

data, the expressive forms of research work performatively. It not only expresses the

research, but in that expression becomes the research itself” (2007, 150). Like Gray’s

characterisation of practice as an ongoing and self-generating mode of research, I

identify with Haseman’s description of practice as performative research, and it

informs the methodological approach of my project.

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I also think of this performative idea of research in relation to Jacques Derrida’s

reworking of J.L. Austin’s notion of performativity; of “doing things with words”

(1975). In my own research I envisage performativity as operating across broader

symbolic and intertextual forms – of doing things with texts. This is because, as

Derrida suggests, the word text “goes beyond the purely discursive”, and works of art

“cannot help but be caught within a network of differences and references that give

them a textual structure” (quoted in Brunette & Wills 1994, 15). In deconstructing

Austin’s idea that words act on the world, Derrida suggests that words are already at

once performative, that “the word or concept are never at one with itself”, they are

not fixed to a single context or utterance, and that “an unlimited number of possible

contexts are internal to the words themselves” (Munday 2012, 6). Again, this idea of

texts as fluidly idiosyncratic thoroughly informs the methodology of my project. As

was discussed in relation to the interpretive paradigm and postproduction, the

practice ‘does things’ by connecting or performatively playing with popular cultural

forms.

The feminist theorist Judith Butler explores Derrida’s ideas and argues that

performativity also extends into the subjective and ethical dimensions of culture:

[P]erformativity is not a singular act, but a repetition and a ritual, which

achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of the body,

understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration. (quoted in

Munday 2012, 45)

Ritual and repetition inform my behaviour as a fan and I consider my own

subjectivity and ethical approaches in terms of a sustained creative practice. In fact,

this grafting together of Austin’s idea about the symbolic force of language,

Derrida’s deconstructive reworking of the intertextual conundrums it opens up,

Butler’s extension of it into ethical realms, and Munday’s interpretation of how these

issues impact on educational research have been instructive for my thinking. They

bring together the key ideas that I align with the processes of bricolage and the

operations of fandom that I experience when making art. This making operates in a

performative sense: as ‘doing things with’ – playing with – the slippages between

texts, concepts and contexts in the conversation between fandom and art-making. Not

only does it reflect the recontextualisations and transformations of the works being

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cited (that is, appropriated) – which raises questions about authorship and ownership

– it also emphasises how these operations ‘express the research’ and become new

modes of research in the act of (utterances of) creative practice. This process ‘grafts’

new iterations of the conversations between (con)texts. It forms part of the creative

and critical practice of connecting forms of culture in an ever-expanding network,

and this is why I consider the methodology to be fluid and ongoing. As Derrida

argues, “No context can entirely enclose it” as the connective possibilities of this

network are inexhaustible (1977, 9).

By spending endless hours devouring all manner of pop cultural texts I am also

connecting, compiling and developing an archive of resources that allows me to

critically assess and creatively play with this material. So, in 'performing' my roles as

artist and fan, and creating artwork out of these convergences, I am researching and

demonstrating how these two perspectives overlap and intersect. It is at this site of

performative activities – this ‘third space’ – that the creative and critical

recontextualisations of the fan-based archive fully emerge. This process develops

through the chance occurrences that arise in the research and collection of this

material, the reflection and analysis of it, and its editing and assemblage. Having

broadly outlined the conceptual field across which I have established my

methodology, I will now discuss how my approach to making art can be seen as an

act of cultural (and digital) bricolage.

Bricolage

In the Interpretive Paradigm section, I discussed the figure of the digital-bricoleur in

relation to Bourriaud’s Postproduction art practices, Rancière’s ‘redistribution of the

sensible’ and de Certeau’s everyday practices. Here, however, I want to discuss the

relevance of digital-bricolage in the development of the project’s methodology, and

how my elaboration of bricolage as a research strategy is central to the project’s

outcomes.

The figure of the bricoleur is significant because it most appropriately describes the

idiosyncratic and varied approach to my creative and theoretical explorations in this

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project. The idea of ‘cultural bricolage’ has a significant history in structural

anthropology, visual art and cultural studies, and has been theorised by figures such

as Claude Levi-Strauss, Michel de Certeau, Jacques Derrida, Norman K. Denzin,

Yvonna S. Lincoln and Dick Hebdige, among others. As I understand and use it,

bricolage is the exploratory act of piecing together pre-existing and varied elements

from one’s immediate culture rather than ‘engineering’ new forms from the ground

up. This is done to construct new meanings and forms from disparate symbolic

meanings to generate new or novel juxtapositions. The importance of this process to

me as an approach to making art was summarised by Spivak in her preface to

Derrida’s Of Grammatology:

The reason for bricolage is that there can be nothing else… Sign will always

lead to sign, one substituting the other… as signifier and signified in turn.

(Spivak 1997, xix)

What I find appealing about this strategy for composing artwork is that it allows me

to play with my archive of material in an improvised way, and this enhances the

potential to reconfigure existing signs in original ways. It allows the processes of

collage and montage (as aleatory devices and as visual languages) to become more

formally active in assembling and editing work – rather than being focussed on the

cultural, political or social significance of the material used. I also consider bricolage

to be linked to Rancière’s ideas about the shared terrain of aesthetics and politics –

that in ‘modifying the visible’, bricolage carries a politically emancipatory and

‘disidentifying’ potential. So, while these ideological connotations are important and

are latent in much of the material I collect, I am much more interested in working

according to de Certeau’s definition of bricolage: as a poetic way of ‘making do’

(1984, xv). What I attempt to do by piecing these texts together in formal or material

ways is to discover their new and unexpected potential. By working from the point of

view of the bricoleur, I want to performatively play with the sources – selectively

remove them from their familiar pop cultural surroundings and explore not just the

“network of differences and references that give them a textual structure”, but how

these images and sounds can be re-imagined (Derrida in Brunette & Wills 1994, 15).

I am interested in how this ‘poetic’ approach results in unpredictable and fascinating

creative forms.

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Denzin and Lincoln in the Handbook for Qualitative Research emphasise the value

of the practice-led researcher as bricoleur, and the way s/he uses “the aesthetic and

material tools of his or her craft, deploying whatever strategies, methods and

empirical materials are at hand” to make new knowledge and artwork (2011, 4).

They also describe the idiosyncratic and fluid nature of this research method as

‘emergent’ and as part of a process “which changes and takes new forms as different

tools, methods, and techniques of representation and interpretation are added to the

puzzle” (2011, 4). For me this is the normal territory for making art, and employing

these ideas as the basis for developing the project’s methodology allows me to more

clearly understand what it is to work “between and within competing and

overlapping perspectives and paradigms” (Denzin and Lincoln 2011, 5). I also

understand this territory as a complicated and potentially paradoxical space for the

practice to operate in. By this I mean that in reconsidering different perspectives as

both ‘competing and overlapping’, the practice explores the “incompossible” nature

of art and fandom’s approaches to popular culture (Murray 2008, xi). I will further

unpack this term in Chapter Four’s discussion of the Creative Practice, but here I use

it to reflect the simultaneously “divergent and coexistant” aims and activities of

myself as a bricoleur-researcher (Murray 2008, 248). In creatively exploring culture I

am continually connecting, disconnecting and reconnecting various influences, ideas

and contexts in ways that allow for, and embrace, conceptual paradoxes and

‘incompatibilities’ of thought to poetically co-exist as creative opportunities. This is

the process through which the project then constructs new knowledge in the form of

the creative works.

As discussed, the activities of the bricoleur inform my own elaboration of the role of

the digital-bricoleur. It has helped me identify the key tactics and potential of

bricolage as performative, idiosyncratic, fluid, speculative and poetic. Importantly, as

Spivak says, there is ‘no other way’ with which to engage with the symbolic network

of everyday experience. I identify with these ideas, for they are central to my

practice, and are, in turn, connected to the dissensus, link-making and postproduction

processes I have discussed in the interpretive paradigm. These key features of

bricolage are manifested in the practice through the digital, internet-enabled methods

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of consumption and art-making described in the Interpretive Paradigm, and which

will be further discussed in the Creative Practice section in Chapter Four.

Simply put, the use of bricolage in creative practice underlines the idiosyncratic and

fluid nature of art-making and fandom and compliments the idea of the connoisseur-

fan. It frames the methodology and emphasises how the theoretical and practical

outcomes of this research are developed through speculative and subjective

dimensions. This attitude and way of working constitutes the conceptual and

methodological field in which I approach creative practice. It is through these

creative processes that new knowledge and understandings are made, and this will be

elaborated in the next chapter. Here, I will discuss the artists and theorists who

inform the contextual field of my practice, and how their ideas, practices and

artworks have informed and shaped the development of the creative outcomes of my

research.

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Chapter!3:!Contextual!Review! 27!

Chapter 3: Contextual Review

Theoretical Contexts

This chapter will discuss the various theoretical and creative practices that inform the

research project and establish the specific contextual fields from which I explore the

relationships between fandom and contemporary art. As I have outlined in earlier

chapters, the project is practice-led and the creative work that I produce is the

primary mode of research and discovery. The critical reflection and analysis I make

from the processes of producing these works is further contextualised and informed

by the theoretical interests I explored over the course of the project. In this regard,

the creative outcomes and critical analysis exist in a symbiotic relationship that

provokes a dialogue between content, concept, media and site, all the elements that

make up practice as research. This approach acknowledges that both creative and

critically engaged approaches to developing artwork are fundamental and necessary

in order to create new knowledge.

For the purposes of clarifying the scope and complexities of the contextual terrain I

am traversing I have separated the discussions of theoretical concepts and key

creative practices that inform the project. This enables me to clearly navigate the

multiple influences and ideas involved in my practice and apply a critical lens to my

reading of these. It also helps to locate my work in relation to these theoretical and

artistic contexts so that I can draw new lines of enquiry across and between these

contexts and the creative outputs that I am producing. So although it might seem at

odds with how I think of practice-led research (as a holistic model) it is really just

another way of working in “between and within competing and overlapping

perspectives and paradigms.” that make up the practice (Denzin and Lincoln 2011,

5). Approaching the analysis of the contextual fields this way assists me in making

assessments about the potential overlaps that exist between theory and art, concept

and practice.

This chapter considers the theoretical discussions that have most significantly

informed and framed my practice. I will start by elaborating on Johanna Drucker's

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28! Chapter!3:!Contextual!Review!

examination of how contemporary art practices address the complex and often

contested notions of criticality and complicity. Key to this discussion will be to

outline how Drucker’s ideas about complicity in art practice are analogous with

postproduction practices, as well as theories from the field of Fan Studies. This

chapter will map out and synthesise the concepts of complicity and fandom that have

allowed me to frame the conceptual territory of the research.

In this section, the ideas of fandom pioneered by Henry Jenkins and developed by

Matt Hills provide important paradigmatic contexts for this research, and their ideas

will then be applied to Bourriaud’s notion of postproduction, and grafted onto the

concept of bricolage. The art practices of Douglas Gordon, Paul Pfieffer, Candice

Brietz, Pierre Huyghe, and Jennifer and Kevin McCoy will be examined to discern

how their explorations of popular and screen-based culture inform my own ways of

making. Their approaches to making are important in presenting useful strategies that

seek to creatively and critically examine popular culture.

Complicity and Criticality

Joanna Drucker’s Sweet Dreams: contemporary art and complicity (2005)

significantly addresses the issue of criticality in contemporary art practice. Drucker

reassesses what constitutes criticality in contemporary art, in light of the collapse of

art and pop culture, and uses artists like Gregory Crewdson and Vanessa Beecroft as

exemplars of a kind of ‘complicit-criticality’. These artists acknowledge a positive

engagement with the pop culture forms that they reference in their art practices while

also presenting critical perspectives on them. She argues that it is through this

complicated and complicit relationship with the ‘cultural industries’ that new

immersive spaces are established. Such spaces, she contends, enable these artists to

effectively analyse the complexity of the cultural forms with which they are engaged.

Drucker notes the importance of this complicity when she argues that:

[A]cademic culture has become as much the enemy of independent

alternatives as the culture industry. The former continues its outmoded case

for opposition, negative criticality, and esoteric resistance. But artists in

large part are working in recognition of their relations of compromise and

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contradiction, their more self-consciously positive – or nuanced and complex

– engagements with the culture industry. (2005, 8)

Drucker argues for a theory of 'complicity' that she sees as unifying many of the

disparate art practices that have engaged with popular culture since the 1980s. In

doing so, she attempts to redress what she considers to be the inaccurate conceptual

understandings of contemporary art that are framed by these historical conceptions of

negative ‘resistance’ (2005, 8). She suggests that the modernist, avant-gardist

traditions of art history inappropriately frames much contemporary art as in direct

opposition to popular culture. This leads to misreading the practices of many

contemporary artists because this model of autonomous critique and distanced

analysis cannot account for the engagement many artists make with pop culture and

entertainment in their practices. In fact, Drucker insists that this conception of

'oppositional critique' is out-dated and also limits creative production. Instead, she

argues many contemporary artists display an attitude to popular culture which

vibrates with enthusiasms: an uninhibited engagement with material pleasure

drawn from across the widest spectrum of contemporary experience exists

alongside an impulse to mine the archival riches of our diverse pasts. (2005,

xi)

For me, this enthusiasm is founded in a genuine valuing of the experience of popular

culture, and mining it as content for art. Through establishing an intimate familiarity

with pop culture as a fan it also enables me to closely-read culture as an artist, to

examine how it is constructed – socially, ideologically, politically and culturally.

This in turn allows me to reflect on, and analyse how, these constructs affect my own

subjectivity and identification with these forms. This collusion with pop culture

becomes a

reflective self-consciousness by which art performs the task of insight, and

then of memory, [it] provides a crucial means by which the apparently

seamless, “natural” condition of our existence is called to attention. See this?

Look at that! Take note and rethink what you think you know – again. And

again. By such basic rhetorical principles fine art objects provide the cracks

in the surface of appearance... Through its artifice, it shows the constructed-

ness of its condition – and ours. (Drucker 2005, xiii)

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Drucker’s reassessment of criticality is very relevant for my project because as she

argues – by embracing one’s complicit interactions with culture – an artist might be

better placed to examine culture from new, and more ‘nuanced and complex’

viewpoints. As such, this position suggests new ways to consider popular culture that

moves beyond oppositional legacies of ‘passive’ and ‘active’ audiences and makers.

This has been crucial for developing my methodology and practice. This text helped

me move beyond the misunderstandings I had about the critical dimension of art-

making. It also encouraged me to reconsider those ideas about un-critical

consumption that I had misread in the theories of Adorno and understood from the

history of the modernist avant-garde.

As discussed in the introductory chapter, at the centre of my consumption of pop

culture there has existed an ambivalent ‘love/hate’ relationship about my fannish

compulsions. I felt some guilt about this ambivalence and was torn between my

compulsive tendencies of consumption and the critical function that I had

misunderstood to be the impetus of artistic practice. These had been formed from

historical and personal readings of culture, and Drucker’s realignment of arts

relationship to popular culture allowed me to better understand my own engagements

as a fan and an artist. Indeed, her discussion on the presence and primacy of

complicity as a strategy in many contemporary art practices gave me permission to

explore my own approaches to consuming pop culture and making artworks.

Drucker’s ideas quite accurately convey the complicated cultural conditions I found

in my own practice prior to this project. The unreasonable expectation I held was that

my practice should display a solely oppositional and critical intent, and this was

precluded by my fawning appreciation of pop culture; a situation that meant that I

felt myself stuck in a kind of creative paralysis. Drucker's argument was compelling

for me because it argues that the traditional model of 'criticality' in art is unable to

fully explore the intricacies of the production and reception of contemporary popular

culture. It enabled me to move past a halting state of oppositional critique as an artist,

and, along with Hills work on fan behaviour, allowed me to critically engage with

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the world through embracing the very thing that I felt was the burden of my practice:

my deeply invested relationship with pop culture.

Drucker's complex restaging of complicity and criticality operates through co-option

rather than opposition. She argues that there is no site of wholly oppositional

discourse, and that, instead, artists, theorists and critics all act from positions of

compromise from within existing systems of symbolic and cultural power.

Recognising this enables artists to best co-opt the tools of the culture industry in

order to dissect and examine it. This is why she uses ‘artifice’, not in a pejorative

sense but to describe the kind of artworks created by this co-operative relationship.

This creates certain critical possibilities:

Artifice, the very essence of artistic activity, is the potent instrument of

insight into the machinations of the real and to the constructedness of the

“real” within the shared imaginary of any culture. (2005, 9)

Digital-bricolage, as a methodology, allows this kind of insight into pop culture

because it exposes the seams of popular culture’s constructions. By exploring the

constructs of this ‘shared imaginary’ through art-making it can provide new insights

into how we understand our relation to the culture industries. This kind of criticality

takes form not only in the artwork’s potential to observe the ‘constructedness’ of

culture, but also an ability to “shift it out of phase” (Drucker 2005, 10). This ‘phase

shift’ is art’s invitation to the viewer to reconsider their consumption of pop culture,

and its capacity to ‘redistribute’ their conceptual and practical engagement with it.

Here again I think there is a connection to ‘making visible’ what has not been

previously seen ‘in the realm of the sensible’, which Rancière describes as

“reconstructing the relationship between places and identities, spectacles and gazes,

proximities and distances” (quoted in Carnevale and Kelsey 2007, 259).

Drucker’s discussion of enthusiastic, complicit, uninhibited engagements, and self-

consciously positive compromise, has provided me with another strategy with which

to reconstruct the relationship between art and entertainment. This ability to ‘shift out

of phase’ our traditional engagements with pop culture suggests that artists can

explore creative connections between its forms and social functions. Her ideas bring

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critical form to the activities of the digital bricoleur and her emphasis on ‘reflective

self-consciousness’ and involved engagement with the idiosyncratic, lived

experience of culture provides a site for creative reflection and response. How this

operates in the context of other art practices is addressed in the following section.

Complicity as Practice

Drucker most clearly explains how this notion of complicity operates by analysing

the practices of Vanessa Beecroft and Gregory Crewdson. Firstly, in discussing

Beecroft's performative and precisely staged live display of fashion models, she

questions the assumed dichotomy of complicity and criticality:

Does [Beecroft] love this "world of fashion, feminine stereotypes" - or read

it critically in order to show us "the model as machine lacking subjectivity"?

What if the answer is both? (2005, 17)

These "traditional binarisms" (2005, 107) would either have the work read as solely

critical, or wholly exploitative. Instead, through its structured display of fashion

conscious poses, as well as its use of the gallery as context, both approaches are at

play in Beecroft’s work. According to Drucker, this is precisely the critique being

made – that it is the presentation of the complicated ‘double coding’ that the viewer

encounters and the invitation or provocation it lays out – which lies at the heart of the

work. This ambiguity opens up a space for the viewer to consider the tensions it

stimulates. In the case of Beecroft’s work, the viewer must reconcile the fashion

industry’s presentation of women as objects, presented as they are in the context of

the gallery space. They must contemplate the numerous signs and symbols at play in

this site and potentially discover more about their own assumptions and prejudices,

rather than being given a simple proposition. Beecroft is more interested in raising

questions that lie across the spectrum of these assumed binaries as they are activated,

and perhaps even delights in doing so:

[Beecroft] is too self-aggrandizing for the former [criticality], too self-

conscious for the latter [exploitative], too keenly aware that her every

gesture will raise precisely the hackles that it does. This work is impossible

to contain within a critique of opposition since it is clearly a consumable

radical gesture. (2005, 107)

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Figure 3.1. Vanessa Beecroft, Untitled (VB35), 1999,

Silkscreen colour print, 50.8 x 71.1cm. From: ClampArt Gallery: Vanessa Beecroft. Accessed April 20, 2012. http://clampart.com/2012/06/untitled-vb35/

Figure 3.2. Gregory Crewdson, Untitled (Ophelia), 2001,

Digital C-print, 121.9 x 152.4 cm. From: Gagosian Gallery: Gregory Crewdson. Accessed April 20, 2012.

http://www.gagosian.com/exhibitions/june-29-2002--gregory-crewdson/exhibition-images

This figure is not available due to copyright restrictions. Please refer to the citation included in the caption below.


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Drucker also uses her discussion of Gregory Crewdson’s photographic practice to

highlight points of difference between traditional and contemporary understandings

of criticality. She points out that ‘traditional’ oppositional readings of Crewdson's

work frame his co-option of Hollywood-level production values as a “transgressive”

act and that he turns Hollywood’s tools on itself to critique the culture-industry's

conception and promulgation of illusory American ideals (2005, 2). Drucker argues,

however, that such a reading fails to satisfactorily account for the headily seductive

nature of Crewdson's images themselves. That rather than being ‘edgy’, or

transgressive in their aims, such images are in fact “‘not’ very edgy and are instead a

‘very consumable’ engagement with illusion” (2005, 3). It is this paradox that best

represents the essence of complicit-criticality. Like Beecroft's models, Crewdson's

artwork is so steeped in the language of mass media that it presents to a viewer the

kinds of complications and tensions that demand them to consider more deeply their

own relationship to pop culture. While Drucker acknowledges that this approach

does have its roots in the postmodern idea of contingency in earlier art practices, she

insists that her notion of complicity extends beyond postmodern attitudes that display

an “arch ironic distance to both making and representing” (2005, 10). She argues

[I]n the place of this diffidence and disdain, a distinct mood of engaged,

expressive affectivity has come into play. Crewdson loves his sources and he

clearly aspires to have his own work approach their condition of production

in every way. (2005, 10)

This idea of ‘expressive affectivity’ replacing ‘distancing’ attitudes of cynicism,

irony and disdain resonates strongly with my approach to making art. Affect

becomes a central element to my own reception of pop culture and, like Crewdson, I

also desire to emulate the production values of the images and forms that my fannish

compulsions lead me to. As I gave an example of in Chapter Two, and will discuss

further in Chapter 4, my admiration and consumption of Hollywood-style narratives

and production values leads to an intimate and obsessive revisiting of those things

through a creative and citational engagement as art. Drucker suggests that such

subjective, affective engagements do not preclude any form of critical function in a

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practice. That, instead, this non-oppositional sense of critical engagement can avoid

ideological didacticism and work to intersubjectively resonate with the viewer.

We don't respond to the thing “in itself” as if it simply offered meaning

unequivocally... Instead, these images are a means of mediating our relation

to other images, past and present, in zones from fine art to vernacular and

popular culture... When [works such as Crewdson's] are as consumable in

their repulsive-but-appealing tension, then they resonate profoundly through

our shared cultural knowledge base. (2005, 10)

Drucker's argument is that by better understanding how our shared symbolic

representations are presented and consumed, artists can engage audiences with

objects and images familiar to them. By doing this they might establish a certain

conflict or prompt new questions for the viewer about how such signs and symbols

can be read. By embracing the possibilities of re-presenting the images and objects of

pop culture, the technology we consume it through, and the shared language it brings

with it, “[the] admission of complicity... is the starting point of critical awareness”

(2005, 11). Drucker’s suggestion is that the shared complicity that these artworks

provoke can potentially make the viewer aware of the processes, ideologies, tropes

and desires that are in operation both in the artwork and in visual culture at large. So

Beecroft’s and Crewdson’s artworks reveal that “[w]e are all within ideologies that

artistic means bring into focus and form” (2005, 11).

Drucker's understanding of many current art practices is that they bring perspectives

of social, political and cultural experience into being “perversely” (2005, 107). By

avoiding didactic or polemical agendas and leaving artworks open in their conception

and presentation, she describes artists as initiators of a process of “imagining

otherwise”, which is continued by the viewer (2005, 8). This, Drucker proposes,

remains a critical action, but an aberrantly positive one that is pluralistic, and is

“expressive and engaged” with its subject matter, rather than negative and

oppositional (2005, 10). For this project, the open and subjective nature of this

‘imagining otherwise’ comes out of the possibilities to make art that is enabled by

my own fandom, and the intersubjective affectivity this art might bring into being

when exhibited.

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Fandom

The ideas and critical texts that serve as contextualising frameworks and reference

points for this project are drawn from an eclectic range of sources and reflect the

connections that the creative practice makes from visual art to entertainment. In this

respect, the field of Fan Studies provides significant focusing and framing for my

practice. Specifically, Media Studies guru Henry Jenkins’ seminal examination of

fans in Textual Poachers (1992), and Cultural/Media studies theorist Matt Hills’

next-generation discussion of this phenomenon in Fan Cultures (2002). Both of these

have been central to contextualising the critical and creative possibilities of my

engagements with popular culture as a fan and an artist.

Henry Jenkins – Textual Poachers

The history of fan studies can be divided into three generations (Gray, Sandvoss, and

Harrington, 2007). Incorporating the breadth and scale of these fan studies lies

beyond the scope of this research. So, while the second generation of fan studies took

cues from the structuralist sociological frameworks of Pierre Bourdieu, there are two

figures from the first and third generations that most succinctly identify the central

concerns relevant to this project and provide the focus and contexts for the research.

In the first wave of theory in the early 1990s, writers such as Henry Jenkins

responded to the traditional, and then somewhat derogatory, idea of the fan as a

‘fanatic’. He sought to reframe fans as a disempowered, but meaningful, minority

group (2007, 3). These ideas were influenced by Michel de Certeau's The Practice of

Everyday Life and subsequently established some of the key developments around

fandom. Jenkins became instrumental in shifting the notion of fans from uncritical

consumers into more informed and creative contributors to popular culture.

In Textual Poachers (1992) Jenkins’ research into television fans recast them from

passive and slavish consumers of culture into those more actively engaged with it –

in his terms, fans became ‘poachers’ and ‘nomads’. His research shifted the idea of a

fan to someone who ‘hunts down’ parts of existing culture and builds alternative

interpretations and individual constructs from it. I also feel that this process of

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actively seeking out aspects of pop culture in order to reconfigure or recontextualise

them is analogous to Rancière’s and Bourriaud’s re-conceptions of artistic practice as

discussed earlier. The nomadic fan relates to Rancière’s idea of artists as occupying a

“topography of possibilities” from which to ‘disidentify’ from (quoted in Carnevale

and Kelsey 2007, 257). The constructive, poaching fan also echoes Bourriaud’s call

for artists to re-edit ideological and historical narratives to develop ‘alternative

scenarios’ for pop culture (2002, 45). In these ways, Jenkins suggested that these

actively creative fans – these close readers of culture – often roam across the cultural

landscape in a much broader fashion than the older ‘singularly obsessive’ ideas of

fans:

[Readers] are not simply poachers; they are also ‘nomads’, always in

movement, ‘not here or there,’ not constrained by permanent property

ownership but rather constantly advancing upon another text, appropriating

new materials, making new meanings. (1992, 36)

Through examining the activities of fans of various television shows Jenkins

discovered a rich and productive community of creative activity. He examined the

legions of fans who attended conventions and frequented online forums to discuss

their favourite show’s strengths and weaknesses. They were also generating new

texts, writing new fan fictions within and between the various ‘universes’ of the

programs they were infatuated with. In combining Dr. Spock with Doctor Who, these

new texts demonstrated the richly critical perspectives that fans held of how their

favoured shows were structured. Their reflexive and intertextual reinterpretations

made important additions to the original texts for the fan and their communities.

They allowed them to reflect on, and experiment with, the formal, conceptual and

even psychological constructs present within their television viewing.

Jenkins’s research enabled me to reflect on my own behaviour as an ‘active

participant’ (1992, 24) in both the reception and the (re)construction of pop culture –

and this fed into my art-making. The parallels here with the activities of the bricoleur

are obvious. As a fan I ‘advance’, ‘appropriate’ and ‘make new meanings’ derived

from my personal experiences. These highly affectual experiences are characterised

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by the kind of intimate proximity – or close reading – that I have with the objects of

my desire. I am both willingly complicit with these objects of my desire but also

critically recontextualise them through my art practice. This process has also led me

to understand that my practice operates from the perspective of a connoisseur fan –

as I have previously discussed. As much as I am driven by the objects of my

fascination, I am also deeply invested in other art and art practices – and this

provides the lens through which I seek out, appropriate, collect and reimagine these

things as artworks. As I described in Chapter Two, this is how I linked John

Baldessari to Steven Spielberg and came up with the video Untitled (after Steven and

John). In the next section I will elaborate on how other artists have also connected

with my fannish preoccupations to influence the creative outcomes that I will further

examine in Chapter Four.

In acting out the processes of fandom through creative practice, I consider my

approach to popular culture as being totally at odds with conventional notions of

passive consumerism. Doing this research on fandom and recognising the active

potential of these obsessively close readings of cultural artefacts became a strategy

for making art and engaging audiences. I relate these activities as an artist/fan to

Rancière’s ‘re-distribution of the sensible’ – of finding “a capacity for enunciation

not previously identifiable within a given field of experience” (1999, 35-36). This

desire to better enunciate how the experiences of pop culture influenced my self-

identification and my art-making, also led me to the third-generation of fan studies,

and to Matt Hills’ Fan Cultures (2002).

Matt Hills – Fandom and Academia

Matt Hills’ book Fan Cultures (2002) has been even more important in rethinking

the idea of the ‘nomadic poacher’ that Jenkins discusses. Hills work describes fans as

‘transmedia’ readers who avidly consume a wide range of cultural forms through

numerous media (2002, 2). He develops the idea of textual ‘poaching’ and

contemporaneously situates it in the era of the internet. Again, here was an idea that

mirrored my own approach to making, and this research prompted me to better

exploit my behaviour as a fan to inform the processes of my art practice.

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Hills’ work theorises fandom by addressing the tensions he sees between academia

and fandom. He uses the twin terms of ‘scholar-fan’ and ‘fan-scholar’ (or academic)

to address the complicated mix of critical objectivity and fannish complicity that

many artists (and academics) like myself need to negotiate. Just as Drucker argues

for academics to rethink their attitudes towards art and criticality, Hills wants them to

admit to the subjective or fannish aspects of their institutional investments. Hills sees

academia as an institutionally sanctioned system of intellectuals, writers and

educators who lay claim to an idea of objectivity and ‘rational discourse’ in their

intellectual pursuits (2002, 4). But he identifies that the same compulsions and

practices that operate in fandom are also present in academia’s ‘cultish’ adherence to

schools and figures of thought. He plainly identifies such choices of theoretical

discourse are still personal and subjective behaviours. He argues this reassessment is

one that can better inform both fields.

Academics are not resolutely rational, nor are fans resolutely immersed.

Academic knowledge is not always meaningfully 'testable', nor is fan

knowledge always 'informal' or 'experiential'. (2002, 21)

He, in turn, conflates and inverts these terms, discussing the ‘fan-scholar’ and the

‘scholar-fan’, to address the potential in both positions – where practitioners may

originate from either academia or fandom, or be located between both. This

admission aims to dispense with the simplistic dualism of fandom and academic,

and, instead, embraces the complexities of spaces that traverse both positions (2002,

7). He describes these two seemingly incompatible approaches to culture of

criticality (academia's objective rational discourse) and complicity (fandom's

subjective immersed experience) as forming a “dialectic of value” (2002, 81). This

conflation stresses the “essentially contradictory process” of fandom (2002, 144),

which if embraced can better serve both approaches in their respective examinations

of culture. It is in this space of contradiction that this project operates – enacting this

dialectic through the operations of the practice. I frame my art-making process as

operating across the spaces of ‘artist-fan’ and ‘fan-artist’ in order to explore the

critical and creative potential of this relationship. This contradictory space is also

related to Hills' overlapping space of ‘imagined subjectivities’ between academia and

fandom. It is analogous to Drucker’s discussion of avant-gardist ‘criticality’ and

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contemporary ‘complicity’ in art practices, and it relates to Rancière’s idea of

Indisciplinarity; of challenging the arbitrary boundaries that many disciplines have

established in order to protect or serve their own interests (2008).

This is very relevant to the project because in his discussion of fan practices Hills

asks:

One important question which has not yet been adequately addressed is

‘what fandom does culturally’ rather than how fandom can be fitted into

academic norms of ‘resistant’ or ‘complicit’ readings. (2002, xii)

It appears here that Hills is essentially posing the same “why not both?” question that

characterises Drucker’s reading of Vanessa Beecroft's motivations. Like Drucker’s

rejection of what she sees as a redundant model of oppositional discourse that defines

the avant-gardist tradition, Hills rejects the “decisionist narratives” (2002, xii) that

aim to delineate fandom and fan behaviours into ‘good’ and ‘bad’ camps. In fact,

Hills’ rhetorical question about whether “these fan attachments and interpretations

[should] be devalued as commercial complicity or valued as creative expressions of

audience agency?” (2002, xii) succinctly frames the contributions that he and

Drucker make to the project. It also relates back to Rancière’s question of why or

how certain boundaries are established between disciplines – or the “distribution of

territories” as he describes it,

…which is always a way of deciding who is qualified to speak about what…

[and what is it] that separates those regarded as qualified to think from those

regarded as unqualified; those who do the science and those who are

regarded as its objects (2008, para. 5).

This question of ‘who is qualified to speak’ also reverberates strongly for me,

situated as I am as artist, fan and academic, and has been important to the

development of the methodology over the course of the project. It has underlined the

role of the digital bricoleur as an exemplary model for creative and critical research

because it challenges the boundaries of any one of those roles – it de-territorialises

them all.

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The work of Jenkins and Hills carefully catalogues and analyses examples of fan

behaviours and creative responses to popular culture. Their research can also be

closely aligned with Drucker’s observations of artists like Beecroft and Crewdson.

Like my own approach to making, these artists also appear to desire, engage with,

and creatively appropriate the tropes or production values of popular culture.

Likewise, what Hills frames as a combination of objectivity and subjectivity that

forms the critical space of fandom in popular culture, Drucker frames as an issue of

nuanced artistic criticality born out of complicity in the ‘culture industries’. This

convergence between fandom and artistic practice, complicity and criticality, has

come to delineate the project. It is in the space of complicit immersion with popular

culture that a critical engagement evolves and is articulated through the creative

outcomes. These encounters also shape the methodology that I’m developing through

the ideas and processes that emerge from this process, and further reiterate the model

of the digital-bricoleur as central to forming an original contribution to knowledge in

this area.

Subjectivity and Affect

The concepts of subjectivity and affect are fundamental to my experience as a fan and

an artist because they address the psychological dimensions of my engagements with

pop culture. My understanding of these terms is primarily developed from Slavoj

Zizek’s ideas on psychoanalysis and Julie Kristeva’s framing of affect. These

discussions – along with Matt Hills’ research into models of fan behaviour discussed

later – have informed my own exploration of my fandom’s subjectively affectual

experience, and its implications for making and engaging with artwork. It is

important to signal that as a bricoleur-researcher my adoption of these ideas about

subjectivity and affect is idiosyncratic to the projects aims and outcomes. As with

Rancière’s indisciplinarity, it is not intended to demonstrate a fidelity to its ‘correct’

boundaries but is grafted across other ideas in order to open my creative practice up

to a multiplicity of possible outcomes and interpretations.

For the purposes of dealing with the affectual experiences and conditions that define

the practice, it is important to address the model of subjectivity from which I am

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working. Firstly, I consider subjectivity to encompass a person’s (the Self or Subject)

ongoing impression of, and internal response to, their lived experience of the external

(the Other) world. However, I also recognise that this essentially Cartesian model of

subjectivity is complicated by more contemporary conceptions that decentre the idea

of subjectivity, shifting away from a sense of unified ‘Self’. By this I mean that I also

consider subjectivity in respect to the work of Jacques Lacan and his theories of

psychoanalysis. I’m particularly interested in the idea of our subjectivity as

continually shifting in negotiation with Lacan’s orders of the Imaginary, the

Symbolic and the Real. It is Slavoj Zizek, though, who has largely informed my

understanding of subjectivity as a construction formed by the Self (Subject) in

interaction with these distinct orders, or dimensions of the world. He describes this

subjectivisation as a process that seeks to form a “meaningful narrative” from of the

chaotic experience with the Real (2000, 186). So out of this chaos,

the subject (presup)poses the existence of a symbolic network which enables

him to experience the universe as a meaningful totality, as well as to locate

his place in it, i.e., to identify himself with a place in the symbolic space

(2000, 186).

The particular relevance of this idea for my practice is that this presupposition of a

symbolic order/network/space (of which popular culture is a component) complicates

a Cartesian model of subjectivity. Zizek’s explains that although this subjectivisation

allows us to construct ourselves as a distinct ‘somebody’, this understanding must

then contend with other intersubjective understandings – a knowledge that “every

one of us is identified with, pinned down to, a certain fantasy place in the other’s

symbolic structure” (2000, 5). As an example, Zizek describes the hypothetical

situation where a subject’s “‘real father’ is a miserable individual obliged to sustain

the burden of the Name of the Father, never fully adequate to his symbolic mandate”

(2000, 6). In other words, there is a potential for complication (a ‘miserable burden’)

in intersubjectively framing our lived experience in the terms of the symbolic order,

and this burden remains unreconciled by both subjects.

What I am interested in exploring in my practice is a fandom-based understanding of

this model of subjectivity – one that considers this ‘fantasy place’ and the supporting

symbolic structure to be primarily influenced by popular culture. In particular, I’m

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interested in the complications that might permeate subjective and intersubjective

understandings from these influences. So my practice explores the implications of

Zizek’s idea that “fantasy [and popular culture] tells me what I am to my others”

(1997, 9). To translate this situation into an example from my practice, one

complication that I’m interested in, is the nature of the ‘burden’ that I might carry

when attempting to reconcile filmic depictions of masculinity with my own

experience. As I will discuss further in Chapter Four, my interest in this is given

form through the transformational citation of these depictions. In my video work

Running Men, I essentially ‘trap’ these male film characters in endlessly running

loops as a way to try and ‘make sense’ of their role in my own subjectivisation. This

trapping allows me to examine the questions “What do others want from me? What

do they see in me? What am I to others?” by closely reflecting upon my affectual

response to these characters (Zizek 1997, 9). As will be discussed below, this model

of subjectivity also relates to Hills adaptation of the work of psychoanalytic theorist

D.W. Winnicott and the field of ‘object-relations’ – where cultural forms can become

‘transitional objects’ that aid in the construction of subjectivity. Firstly, however, I

will address this idea of my affectual experience and engagements with popular

culture forms.

In my practice I am interested in creatively exploring affect from the

psychoanalytical perspective of Julie Kristeva, who frames it as the internalised pre-

verbal feelings or experiences that precede signified emotions (Barrett 2011, 64). In

relation to my own fandom, I readily identify with the idea of my pop culture

consumption as generating feelings that Kristeva describes as “fluctuating energy

cathexes [which are] insufficiently stabilized to coalesce as verbal or other signs”

(quoted in Barrett 2011, 63). I think of this indeterminate site – where I embrace and

rapturously consume culture – as an experiential space, a site not easily

comprehended through language. So that while on later reflection I can begin to

identify some of my affectual experiences as positive, negative or ambivalent, in the

midst of my creative practice these affective engagements are primarily a space for

experiencing emotional uncertainty or provocation. I think of them as producing a

poetic space that encourages “feelings [that] are poised at the very threshold that

separates being from knowing and thus have a privileged connection to

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consciousness” (Damasio 1999, 43). So, in the experience of (for example) watching

a film, reading a book or listening to music, I oscillate between being and knowing –

of losing and gaining a sense of self and other – consciousness and sub-

consciousness, time and space. I become unsure where I begin or end in physical and

virtual space, or whether my thoughts are my own or vicarious apparitions. This

volatile and exciting site of uncertainty that is generated through affect is what the

practice explores, and how most of the art works are initiated.

I am interested in grafting this idea of affect across Zizek’s ideas about subjectivity

because, together, these ideas reflect the internalised and idiosyncratic emotional

processes of feeling and experience that I get from consuming cultural artefacts; they

both frame and mirror my fantasies, desires, hopes and dreams. The practice

effectively ‘gives voice’ to my affective experiences and explores the tensions

between popular culture and subjectivity. As I will discuss further in the section on

‘Affective Play’, my art-making acts as a way to play with and to closely read my

affective experience, becoming a tool with which to ‘make sense’, not just of the

world, but myself. Firstly, however, I will discuss the psychoanalytical models that

Hills uses to frame fan behaviours.

Play and Transitional Objects

Following on from Jenkins’ textual poachers, Hills also argues for the critical

potential of fans’ creative ‘poaching’. He maintains that fan behaviours cannot be

simply associated with an obsessive and un-critical consumption of pop culture. On

the contrary, these activities actually form (and perform) distinctive and close

readings of the objects of their fanatical desire. As he says:

[F]andom is both a product of ‘subjective’ processes (such as the fans’

attribution of personal significance to a text), and is also simultaneously a

product of ‘objective’ processes (such as the text’s exchange value, or wider

cultural values). (2002, 113)

This observation can also be associated with the way in which both Drucker and

Bourriaud discuss the approaches to making art that are engaging popular culture.

This dialectical combination of apparently opposing attitudes towards pop culture

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resonates with my experiences of fandom and art-making, as well as with my

understandings of much of the art that I am interested in. It reflects the highly

idiosyncratic experiences of my fan behaviours as well as the intersubjective

connections that they enable. These tensions encouraged me to make links – to

undertake research, reflect on and analyse how this behaviour is implicated in the art-

making process, and also how it might be shared. This process has enabled me to

connect the affectual relationship I have with pop culture to the way these

experiences influence my approach to making work. It has also made clear how

affect can be activated, interpreted and shared, and how fans make sense of these

experiences both personally and intersubjectively. Important to this discussion, and

to the project overall, is the notion of play in fandom. As he describes it, this idea of

play extends the idea of the ‘nomadic textual poacher’ towards

[F]andom as a form of cultural creativity or ‘play’, [which] moves, non-

competitively, across the usual boundaries and categories of experience

rather than being caught up within any particular ‘field’.” (2002, 90)

This idea of ‘play’ mirrors my approach to researching and making art as a digital

bricoleur. Because of this connection, it is important to discuss Hills’ unpacking of

what is involved in this idea of play as a sense-making process for this practice-led

research.

Hills examines this notion of play from a psychoanalytical viewpoint and builds on

D.W. Winnicott’s work in establishing the idea of childhood ‘object-relations’ to

describe the process of fan self-identification or subjectivisation. Winnicott's analysis

posits that the objects and structures of childhood play function as ‘transitional

objects’, allowing the child to make sense of the relationship between the internal

world of the ‘Self’, and the external world of the ‘Other'. Hills proposes that in

adulthood popular culture can also operate as a transitional object and this continues

the processes of subjectivisation. He identifies that for an adult fan this process is far

more complicated because, unlike children, adults have a more critical understanding

of the intersubjective nature of popular culture through lived experience. He goes on

to argue that because of this, these ‘transitional objects’ are more properly

understood as ‘secondary transitional objects’ (2002, 76-78). As opposed to the

intensely private and possessive relationship that a child has with their primary

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‘transitional objects’, these ‘secondary transitional objects’ are understood by adults

to be part of a culture that is ‘shared’ with other individuals. This understanding

means that the transitional process happens in what Winnicott describes as a ‘third

space’ – a space of ‘personalised’ culture existing between the Self and the Other

(Hills 2002, 109). This implies that while the object

has not altogether surrendered its affective charge and private significance

for the subject… [fans] must negotiate its intensely subjective significance

with its intersubjective cultural status. (2002, 108-9)

Hills identifies that in the fan’s engagement with a cultural artefact, there is a shift

back-and-forth between different values, the personal and the culturally shared. For

my creative practice, this tension is made most apparent through the appropriation of

cultural texts and the recontextualising of these things as an artist. In his terms,

[t]he fan’s appropriation of a text is therefore an act of ‘final consumption’

which pulls this text away from (intersubjective and public) exchange-value

and towards (private, personal) use-value, but without ever cleanly or clearly

being able to separate out the two. (2002, 35)

Hills goes on to suggest that although such appropriations appear as a fan’s

resistance to passivity, in their affectivity, fans still understand their activities as

operating within a larger system of value; they are able to contextualise their fandom.

This contextualisation is the reason why I consider that my activities as an artist

enable a connoisseur’s approach to the way that I perform my fandom. By

selectively consuming culture according to intersubjective considerations of cultural

worth and through the lens of contemporary art and art practices, I renegotiate my

relationship to popular culture. By creating new artworks I am effectively providing

a different context for cultural artefacts to be experienced in new ways. I am

allowing space for my own affectual experience as an artist, as well as for other

viewers who might recognise and connect (or disconnect) their own affective

experiences with my own. This reflection on affective experience means that while I

am examining how certain cultural forms operate as transitional objects for myself, I

am also grappling with my understanding of them as shared ‘secondary’ transitional

objects. I think of this idea as connecting to Bourriaud’s ideas about open-endedness

that were discussed in Chapter Two. Generating art from my transitional experiences

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means that the subjective construction that I make from them is not the ‘endpoint’ of

meaning – what I am also setting up is a site for other transitional experiences to

occur for the viewer.

Affective Play, Intersubjectivity, and Anxiety

This area of the research grafts together Zizek’s ideas about subjectivity, Kristeva’s

definition of affect, as well as Hills’ examination of fan’s affectivity to discuss how

my activities as a practitioner can be considered, and how these activities result in

creative outputs. Hills argues for a reintroduction of the notion that the process of

negotiating subjective and intersubjective understandings of culture is a playful

process of subjectivisation (2002, 90-98). This process is related to the complicated

‘What am I to others?’ question that Zizek poses. It is also central in connecting my

activities of fan and artist as playing with subjective and objective tensions, of

moving ‘across the usual boundaries and categories of experience’, and

reconfiguring the terrain of the ‘sensible’. As Hills suggests, this ‘making sense’

operates through a more sophisticated and critical understanding of the personal and

intersubjective relationships that popular culture generates. It becomes about how

one ‘can do things culturally’, how one can ‘make new pathways’ across those

relationships. He also argues that fans cannot own these feelings alone; they must

recognise how these symbolic artefacts affect other readings of them, and they need

to acknowledge that social experience (2002, 104-113). This is what activates the

tensions between the various subjective and objective operations of the practice. I

want to maintain a ‘private significance’ for these things, yet I have to negotiate the

‘intersubjective cultural status’ that comes with it. It is this reconciliation between

‘self’ and ‘other’ – this navigation of a shared ‘third space’ – that represents the

somewhat fraught experiences I have in the process of making work.

In Winnicott’s work on ‘object-relations’ theory he describes the navigation of this

‘third space’ as “the perpetual task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet

inter-related” (quoted in Hills 2002, 104). The unceasing nature of this process is at

the forefront of my creative approach, and these psychological complexities play a

key role in the formation of my practice. This unremitting task of reconciling ‘self’

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and ‘other’ generates a general sense of anxiety in my everyday life. This sense of

anxiety is central to my social experience and is connected to my voracious

consumption of popular culture. By this I mean that my unrelenting consumption of

culture is part of an effort to make sense of my anxiety, as well as the result of my

attempts to escape this anxiety. This paradoxical bind, this effort to escape anxiety,

involves moving closer to cultural artefacts that I might feel anxious about

consuming, and it is this movement that, ironically, activates many of the ideas for

the practice.

As an example of this anxious movement or activity, I might compulsively re-watch

a pop-music video because I’m procrastinating, because I want to see what makes it

so popular, because I enjoy its infectiously catchy chorus or because I desire the

singer, but I will simultaneously feel anxious about all of these reasons. My

understanding of this anxiety is informed by Zizek’s explanation of Lacanian anxiety

“as the affect which registers the subject’s panic reaction to the overproximity of the

object-cause of desire” (2000, 120). By compulsively grappling with this anxiety and

my paradoxical activity, I am engaging with what Hills suggests is the response to

this situation as, he says, “what might appear to be a form of ‘addictive play’ among

fans is actually affective play” (2005, 192). By exploring, playing with, or even

trying to escape this affectively anxious experience, new emotional experiences

develop, and different observations on the ‘object-cause of desire’ can be discovered.

So, perhaps, in this way – ironically, strangely, even humorously – affect, fandom

and the creative processing of these connections can create novel understandings in a

process that echoes Hills’ description of,

[a]ffective play [that] ‘creates culture’ by forming a new ‘tradition’ or a set

of biographical and historical resources which can be drawn on throughout

fans’ lives. (2002, 111)

The way in which cultural studies theorist Kurt Lancaster describes the motivations

and activities of fans of the television series Babylon 5, provides another example of

how affective play operates in my practice, which I will now discuss. He suggests

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that in playing a role-playing card game derived from the series, fans are attempting

to find new ‘immersive’ experiences that extend beyond simply watching the show.

[T]hey want to attain haptic-panoptic control over images (and perhaps

feelings) that formerly sped past them during the viewing of Babylon 5.

They can now slow these images down and manipulate them for their own

purposes... Where before the show could only be seen, now it can be both

observed and touched. (2001, 102)

This idea of exerting power over the experience of viewing is also a key element in

the affectively-initiated formal processes in my creative practice. The simple

processes of frame-by-frame video editing, and my use of slow-motion effects, are

similarly employed to gain a sense of control over both the original image, as well

the emotion (feelings) it engenders in me. As I will discuss further in Chapter Four,

an important result of this affective play is the subsequent awareness that it develops

in me about how and why these affectual experiences work. By this I mean that

through this affectually-driven ‘observing and touching’ I can examine conceptual

and creative ‘blind spots’ of thinking that emotions of desire or anxiety may cause.

Out of this reflective process fresh insights are developed about my relationship as an

artist to popular culture. Hills describes this process as “affective-reflexivity” and

stresses its importance in developing the ‘dialectic of value’ between

fandom/academia and consumption/production (2002, 183). It is a process that

enables fans to recognise their affective engagement, and the willingness to openly

admit and examine its causes and effects in their subjective experience. Like

Drucker’s argument that artists work in ‘recognition of their compromise and

contradiction’, it is this affective-reflexivity that allows me to maintain a complicit

and critical approach to pop culture.

Hills’ discussion about how affect and transitional objects can become catalysts for

new experiences of cultural identification also provided important insights into my

activities as a digital-bricoleur. It established the experiential, subjective connections

to the conceptual, material and practical operations of the research. I now understand

my practice as being driven by the emotional (and anxious) experience of, and

relationship to, these objects and structures of ‘transition’. The process of

intersubjective reconciliation involved in the practice “preserves space both for the

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individual fan’s psychology and for the cultural ‘context’ in which fan cultures exist”

(Hills 2005, 90). The process of developing a simultaneously subjective and

intersubjective ‘transitional object' is one that I understand as two separate but

powerfully connected creative activities.

The first creative process involves a personal ‘affectively charged’ encounter with a

cultural artefact that has been also been partially ‘surrendered’ to intersubjective

considerations (Hills 2002, 109). This is achieved by the appropriation of an

emotionally resonant image, scene or element from screen culture. This citational

gesture is an effort to re-experience and re-create this moment, to gain control over

the experience (be it anxiety, desire, ambivalence or all of these) and share it with a

new audience in order to expand on the experience. This aesthetic appropriation also

includes the process of remaking or recontextualising the experience and cultural text

through my own lens. An example of this process would be every face on Vanity

Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995-2008 (2009-2011). In this work, my initial experience

of the Vanity Fair images was so seductive that I was driven to recreate and

investigate it. I was interested in exploring this because it also engendered an anxious

experience of consumption that Zizek suggests is the result of an overproximity to the

object of desire (2000, 120). So I wanted to develop an artwork that aesthetically

questioned these seductive and anxious qualities and experiences and their role in my

subjectivisation.

The second creative process is initiated in an intersubjective fan-space, where a

cultural artefact is encountered because of, or through, a shared fannish interest, and

then later becomes a site of affective-play and making-sense of it (Hills 2002, 109).

An example of this would be my artwork Top Ten Box Office Blockbusters of All

Time, in Dollars (2009-), which came out of my investigation into Hollywood box-

office data and was initiated by my frequenting internet film-fan-sites. While my

reading of this data wasn’t initially ‘affectively-charged’, my continued interest in

the economic implications of these artefacts, and my understanding of the data as a

shared fascination, led me to creatively explore it. These approaches are still the

result of affective engagements with popular culture, however once displayed for an

audience all the works become shared versions of the ‘transitional objects’ I

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discussed in the previous section. My presentation of this series of videos is intended

to exist in a ‘third space’ of intersubjective relations, where my own exploration of

my affective experience can become a site for affectively-transitional experiences for

other viewers as well. This work will be discussed further in the following chapter,

but functions here as an example of how the practice explores intersubjective

qualities and experience of popular culture.

The performative practices of Fandom

The idea of fandom as a culture-making process of ‘affective play’ is also important

as it corresponds with Haseman’s idea of practice-led research as a performative

practice. Both ideas have the recurring theme that practice “not only expresses the

research, but in that expression becomes the research itself.” (2007, 150):

I want to suggest that fandom is not simply a 'thing' that can be picked over

analytically. It is also always performative; by which I mean that it is an

identity which is (dis-)claimed, and which performs cultural work. Claiming

the status of a 'fan' may, in certain contexts, provide a cultural space for

types of knowledge and attachment. (Hills 2002, xi)

Hills contends that a fan’s ‘affective play’ also forms ‘new traditions’ that create new

cultural meanings from existing artefacts (2002, 111). This performative aspect of

fandom is aligned with the digital-bricoleur’s playful repurposing of cultural

material. Both positions use pop culture interactions to construct, understand, reflect

and develop innovative perspectives on their encounters with the world. It is the

acting out and translation of this ‘affective play’ that is at the core of this research

project. It is a crucial aspect of the methodology of the digital-bricoleur, as it frames

the activities of myself as an artist and a connoisseur-fan.

As part of the contextual field of this research, Matt Hills’ discussion of affectual and

intersubjective experiences of fans has been folded across Kristeva’s definition of

affect, and Zizek’s ideas of subjectivity. These ideas work to form a pluralistic

interpretive paradigm that connects the ideas of Bourriaud, Drucker and Rancière in

order to establish how the conceptual paradigms of the practice-led methodology

have been established in the project. The aim of this is to clearly articulate what is

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literally and figuratively at play within moments of idiosyncratic emotional

experience; how these experiences operate in the practice; and how this serves to

frame what this project is exploring. As a way to further contextualise the project, I

will now discuss the research undertaken into the conceptual and practical

approaches of artists who also examine the links between art and entertainment.

These artists have directly and indirectly informed the methodology and outcomes of

this practice-led research project; they make up the primary contexts that I draw on

in reflecting on and making work. As I discussed in the introductory chapter, this

exegetical structure is intended to reflect that the primary focus of the research is

creative practice. By addressing these artistic precedents directly before discussing

my own work, I want to emphasise how it connects to this rich history of practice,

and how the creative outcomes build on this body of knowledge.

Key Contexts of Contemporary Visual Art Practice

Douglas Gordon

An artist who has continued to exert an influence on my approach to practice is

Douglas Gordon. Works like 24 Hour Psycho (1993) and Zidane (2006) (with

Phillipe Parreno) have provided examples of the kind of complicit/critical treatment

of pop culture that is central to the methodology of the practice-led research claimed

in the project. 24 Hour Psycho (1993) examines the temporal experience of both

making and viewing screen-based work within contemporary art and pop culture.

Critic Michelle Grabner discusses the ways in which Gordon’s process of

emphasising the viewing experience of cinema through excessively exaggerating it in

this work “exposes the fundamental composition of cinema” (2005, 258). This is

because it highlights the time it affords the viewer to observe previously overlooked

constructive elements of the film. It asks them to consider how the technical and

conceptual processes, such as the editing process or art direction, construct the

experience of viewing screen-based narratives. The way that Gordon manipulates

and repurposes technology through exhibition processes has led me to carefully

reconsider the effect that this foregrounding of the physical, perceptual, conceptual

and temporal relationships that a viewer can have with screen-based media. His

works also provide a useful model of a practice that strives to understand the

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construction of mass media without disavowing his personal fascination with a

particular element of pop culture.

Katrina Brown explains how 24 Hour Psycho grew out of Gordon’s experimentation

with a VCR’s ‘slow’ function when watching the original film. She suggests that

because of his intense fascination with the scenes in the original film, the work’s

development takes place “somewhere between the academy and the bedroom” (2004,

24). This approach to making, of working ‘across boundaries and categories of

experience’, reflects how my own activities and technical curiosity also operate in

the art practice. Like Gordon, I adopt a playful approach to media, where the use of

slow-motion software plug-ins can begin with the random selection of settings, but

from which can emerge more considered readings of both practice and culture. In

this way, Gordon’s work acts as a model for my own research and practice, ranging

across the countless late-night sessions of internet surfing in my bedroom to the more

considered close visual analysis used when making artworks. It demonstrates what

can be possible to discover through the kind of close reading involved in art’s

engagement with popular culture, and the resulting critical perspectives this can

generate.

Figure 3.3. Douglas Gordon, 24 Hour Psycho (detail), 1993, 24 hour video, dimensions vary.

From: Rush, Michael. 2007. Video art. 2nd ed. New York: Thames & Hudson. Pg.174. Illus


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Candice Breitz

Candice Breitz has been important to this project because of the way her work

processes ideas about self-identification for the viewer of pop culture. Works that

deal explicitly with this idea include King (a portrait of Michael Jackson) (2005),

Mother + Father (2005) and the Becoming series of works (2003). These have all

been extremely influential because of the conceptual and formal approaches implicit

in them. In particular the video work series’, Becoming, Soliloquy Trilogy, and

Mother + Father, represent a skilful use of digital editing processes to examine, and

potentially manipulate the audience’s emotional engagement with the act of

watching. As the curator Suzanne Cotter suggests:

[Breitz’s] edits are not simply precise, they are forensic; dissecting and

revealing the complex web of relations that exist between our sense of the

real and the dramatized, between true emotion and induced experience.

(2003, 3)

Like Gordon, her work also prompted me to more deliberately consider what it is

possible to discover through a rigorous examination of the objects of screen-based

culture. Importantly, it prompted me to contemplate the degree to which formal and

material processes can be used to engage an audience and invite them to reassess

their own relationship to these widely shared experiences.

Figure 3.4. Candice Breitz, Mother + Father (detail), 2005, twelve-channel installation, 13:15 mins and 11 mins duration.

From: ArtIntelligence: Candice Breitz: Identity in the Cutting Room. 2007. Accessed October 10, 2012. http://artintelligence.files.wordpress.com/2007/06/breitzfathermother2005.jpg


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Cotter also claims that although the audience derives “pleasure in recognising and

succumbing to the original power of the artist’s source material”, at the same time

Breitz’s careful re-working interrupts the original viewing pleasure and so casts

“doubts and questions” as to the authenticity of the experience (2003, 3). It is this

tension and the intersubjective possibilities that come from the affective experience

that I am interested in generating in work. Her ‘forensic’ editing tactics are

something I also explore in my practice as a way to vicariously draw the viewer into

those experiences. I am also interested in giving the viewer time for these

experiences to develop in the way that Linda Nochlin describes,

Breitz renders increasingly suspect the emotion, the moralism, and the entire

meaning of the performers' phrases and gestures. We come to focus on the

actors and their pronouncements as pure performance, devoid of any

relationship to the purported human value their media presence is selling to

the public. (2005, 125)

While works like Mother + Father have been valuable for thinking about visually

simplifying (through rotoscoping and looping) my own work, perhaps more

important has been Breitz’s use of technical devices and the codes of popular culture

as reference points to construct intersubjective experiences. This reflects how my

own affectual experiences as a fan, and my creative decisions as a digital bricoleur

can be reconciled with the idea of a shared ‘third’ space of culture. So, while the

technical precision of her appropriations and edits has informed my approach to

editing, the way these edits act to reframe cultural artefacts is a strategy I found

equally as important. This is something I consciously employ as I develop work in

order to encourage the audience to question the realities and fictions that exist within

their own constructs of self and other.

Pierre Huyghe

This idea of using creative practice to explore and critically examine culture is also

very pertinent to my interest in the work of Pierre Huyghe. Huyghe is an artist that,

for me, exemplifies postproduction practices, and my interest in his approach to

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practice is because he suggests that constantly developing technologies create a

broader range of mass media forms for contemporary audiences to engage with. This

in turn, he argues, creates a greater need to process and closely examine mass media,

because the proliferation of these technologies also allows audiences (and

practitioners) to sample and recontextualise this flow of culture. Much like

Bourriaud’s notion of art re-editing ideological and historical narratives (2002, 45),

Huyghe believes that culture should be repurposed in an effort to “expand and

change existing narratives” (quoted in Allen 2006, para. 8). Like Drucker, he thinks

artists should actively redefine their own relationship to the construction and

consumption of popular culture. In No Ghost, Just a Shell (2000) (his collaboration

with Philippe Parreno) the rights were purchased to a manga (Japanese comic-book)

character, which was then re-appropriated by the artists, as well as licensed to other

artists to do the same. The computer animations and images that these

recontextualisations comprised, constructed a new series of histories for the

character. In this way, the fictional character was given a second ‘life’ and was

effectively liberated from the fate of being lost amidst the mass of manga culture. I

found this use of digital technologies and manipulation of mass media as significant

when thinking about repurposing, recontextualising and renegotiating my own

relationship to pop culture.

Huyghe’s works, such as The Third Memory (1999) and L'Ellipse (1998), have also

been crucial in informing my thinking about the temporal and meta-temporal nature

of moving image and narrative construction in cinema. The Third Memory in

particular demonstrates how time-based work can create a complex interplay

between fantasy and reality. This slippage between constructed notions of reality and

the real also relates to Matt Hills' ideas about the potential for fans to indulge in

creative play within this ‘third space’, between fantasy and reality, self and other.

This psychological aspect of creative play is underlined by Tom Morton when he

argues that in allowing John Wojtowicz (whose real-life story was played by Al

Pacino in the 1975 film Dog Day Afternoon) to recreate his own past for the camera,

Huyghe “gives Wojtowicz... the opportunity to reappropriate his past, and in a sense

he does, transforming it into a fresh fiction, a third – perfect – memory.” (2003, para.

8). Michael Rush’s interpretation of this work echoes Hills’ view of fan behaviour

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when he refers to a blurring of factual and fictional spaces, objectivity and vicarious

behaviours (2001, 122). In this way, this work connects to the discussion of

subjectivity earlier in the chapter. It demonstrates and questions the mechanisms and

perspectives involved in the constant renegotiation of one’s sense of self to

ourselves, and to others. In particular, it broaches the idea that popular culture plays

an important role in implementing how we recall our histories and continually

reappraise our identities. The work poses the questions “What do [others] see in me?

What am I to others?” that Zizek suggests are the essence of fantasy and subjectivity,

and leaves open a multiplicity of readings for the viewer to begin answering such

questions (1997, 9).

Figure 3.5. Pierre Huyghe, The Third Memory (detail), 1999, 2 channel beta digital video, 9:46 mins.

From: Rush, Michael. 2007. Video art. 2nd ed. New York: Thames & Hudson. Pg.170. Illus.

Huyghe’s approach to the appropriation and recontextualisation of pop mythologies

provides a useful model for extending the conceptual and creative aspects of this

project. As he points out, not only is there the need for contemporary artists to

employ these tactics in order to have the viewer become an active participant in

constructing culture, but also to emphasise the empowering role of technology within

these activities. Like Jenkins’ ‘textual poacher’ and Bourriaud’s postproduction

artist, Huyghe is concerned with reconfiguring the existing fabric of culture; of

‘modifying coordinates’, reconstructing relationships, and possibly forming a site for

dissensus. As he says:

Today, one cannot and does not have to tell more stories… One can only

expand and change existing narratives. Technology allows us to use all sorts


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of things, to quote, to sample. There's a stronger output of images and stories

as well as a stronger need to understand what one is being supplied with. But

nobody wants to be just a continually fed terminal. One would like to be able

to inhabit one's own culture, to participate in it. (quoted in Allen, 2006, para.

8)

This site of technological habitation that Huyghe discusses here is where most of the

creative outcomes have developed over the course of the project. Huyghe’s practice

has been influential because of the way it models the kind of ‘dissensus’ that

Rancière discussed – “of reconstructing the relationship between places and

identities, spectacles and gazes, proximities and distances” (quoted in Carnevale and

Kelsey 2007, 259). Further to this, the way this intervention and modification of

established culture is essentially informed by the simple, quotidian operations of the

internet and digital culture (cutting/pasting, quoting/sampling) is something that I

find empowering. How Huyghe’s work employs these strategies, and how he

examines the ways in which the technologically mediated subjectivities of fans and

artistic practice come about, are the ideas that I am carefully thinking about as ways

of engaging audiences in my own practice.

Jennifer and Kevin McCoy

The artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, have also been important touchstones for the

research because they employ a kind of deconstructivist, database aesthetics

(Manovich 2001) approach to popular culture. They also offer another example of

the kind of close reading that comes through the fannish behaviours that I’m

exploring. Their strategies for art-making are also germane to my project outcomes

because they focus on the literal and conceptual dissection of pop culture by

exploiting the inherent qualities of the media they work with. Works like Every

Short, Every Episode (2000) and Every Anvil (2001) reveal the McCoys as database-

style practitioners. Their careful dismantling of television shows (Starsky and Hutch

or Loony Tunes respectively) separates each shot of the programs into different

categories of shot-type and content. This database is presented to viewers as shelves

of DVDs, from which they can select and playback the newly catalogued clips on

custom-built displays. In doing so, the works reveal the genre dependent use of

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various tropes in television. This also gives the viewer the opportunity to engage

with these video clips in a listed format, independent from the chronological order of

the original footage. Stephanie Cash points out how this approach not only “draw[s]

attention to filmic structure and narrative devices” but in allowing for non-linear

interaction with these short clips, also demonstrates an innate “understand[ing of] the

notion of the ‘MTV attention span” (2005, 124-5). Along similar lines, critic and

writer Barbara Pollack suggests that the presentation of this sampling, as well as the

short, clip-sized nature of these works examines the temporal experience of popular

culture and exposes the short attention span of contemporary audiences (2002, 112).

Figure 3.6. Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Every Shot, Every Episode, 2000 277 DVDs with sound, carrying case, and LCD monitor.

From: Flickr page of mccoyspace. 2005. Accessed 15th March, 2008. http://www.flickr.com/photos/mccoyspace/4981764/in/set-124273/

This emphasis on a database style listing and dissection of pop culture, both

technically and conceptually, has been extremely influential to my practice. The idea

of separating out and examining the discrete elements of screen-based media has

been a strategy that I have also employed in my practice. This is partly a way of

expressing and exploring the changing nature of my (and contemporary audiences)

viewing expectations. But, more fundamentally, it is a strategy with which to engage

with the postproduction notion of ‘cultural curation’, a way to re-edit existing

narratives and forms to generate fresh perspectives on consumption. It becomes part


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of my approach towards ‘making sense’ of the overwhelming mass of screen-culture,

and these works more practically exemplify how artists can incorporate and consider

the larger contexts of their cultural consumption.

Paul Pfeiffer

Paul Pfeiffer’s conceptual and technological treatment of digital media and software

has been particularly important for understanding how loops can be manipulated in

my own practice. In Still from Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon)

(1999), Pfeiffer appropriates, rotoscopes and loops footage of an NBA basketball

player celebrating a slam-dunk. By editing out the other players and looping the

footage back and forth, Pfieffer captures the figure in an endless display of

aggressive masculine exultation. David Hunt suggests that Pfeiffer’s use of the

rotoscoping and looping creates a viewing experience where the player “becom[es] a

universal template of our desires and longings for cathartic release” (2000, para. 8).

Hunt expands on this idea, saying, “the loop is both microscope and telescope,

enlarging the quotidian, even as it pulls the distant horizon in front of us.” (2000,

para. 10).

This idea that loop editing can ‘enlarge the quotidian’ and destabilise the spatial and

temporal perspectives of screen-based works is why it is a major feature of my own

approach to practice. The use of looping as a technical, formal, and conceptual

device holds many possibilities for making and exhibiting work. At its simplest form,

the loop can act to disrupt the flow of screen-based media, shifting or subverting the

viewer’s usual expectations of narratives. It can be used to employ repetition to

playfully reinforce or critically reveal the nature of mass media’s cycle of

consumption. I also think of it as an integral part of fan-based creative play because I

use it to manipulate the perceptual and conceptual engagements I have with pop

culture in order to intensify the affective relationship I have with it.

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Figure 3.7. Paul Pfeiffer, Still from Fragment of a Crucifixion (After Francis Bacon),

1999, still from digital video loop, DVD player, miniature projector & metal armature, 7.6 x 10cm

From: Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art: Paul Pfeiffer. Accessed April 20, 2012. http://kw-berlin.com/deutsch/archiv/pfe/pfe.html

The discussion around the McCoys’ and Pfeiffer’s isolation and looping of

appropriated footage reveals the power that even simple digital operations can have

for radically reconfiguring artefacts of popular culture. These formal operations can

shift appropriative practices into something that not only reveals the constructedness

of pop culture, but also emphasises the durational and spatial aspects of viewing and

critically ‘reading’ this type of artwork. Artists like Pfieffer and, more recently,

Jeremy Blake have informed the digital operations that are central to my working

processes. Although works such as Pfeiffer’s The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle)

(2001) and Blake’s Winchester series (2003) appear very different, I have responded

to their treatment of the temporal and spatial qualities of video as a medium – as a

‘pliable’ material – and their use of video in an abstract, painterly way. They both

use the screen as kind of canvas, ‘painting’ out, or in, brushstrokes that are then

constrained temporally, shifting and expanding the experience of watching and, in

effect, creating what I consider to be video paintings. This has informed my own

thinking by prompting me to re-examine and re-work the formal qualities of existing

works in order to be more sensitive to their ‘painterly’ potential.


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Figure 3.8. Paul Pfeiffer, The Long Count (Rumble in the Jungle) (detail), 2001, digital video loop, LCD monitor, DVD player, and metal armature,

15.24 x 17.78 x 152.4 cm From: Sollins, Susan and Sollins, Marybeth. 2003. Art 21: art in the twenty-first century 2.

New York: Harry N. Abrams. Pgs. 192-193. Illus.

Figure 3.9. Jeremy Blake, 1906 (stills), 2003, from the Winchester trilogy,

DVD with sound, 21-minute continuous loop From: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: Jeremy Blake.

Accessed April 20, 2012. http://www.sfmoma.org/exhib_events/exhibitions/200#ixzz1sTrP8Cwi

Andy Warhol et. al.

Given the primacy of practice as research in the project, I consider these artworks

and artist’s practices to be critical to informing new ways of making art. There are

many, many more artists whose practices set important precedents for the formal and

conceptual explorations that this practice is undertaking. Out of this rich history of

historical and contemporary practices it is perhaps Andy Warhol who initially



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sparked the research for the project – because he was arguably the ‘guru’ of the kind

of complicity that is examined in the project. Warhol’s thinking about art, and his

approach to making it, was extremely formative in my undergraduate art education.

Although his still image and screen-based work is less prominent an influence in my

current practice, my (and Drucker’s) understanding of complicit critique is certainly

indebted to his conflating of art and entertainment, and art practices and technology.

This is signposted clearly by critic Hal Foster when he identifies Warhol’s

strategy of pre-emptive embrace of the very compulsive repetition that a

consumerist society demands of us all. If you can’t beat it, Warhol implies,

join it; more, if you enter it totally, you might expose it; you might reveal its

enforced automatism through your own excessive example. (2005, 30)

Warhol’s influence on my practice, although not readily apparent, cannot be

underestimated in provoking the challenging questions around my own experiences

as an artist and fan that led to this research. Some of the other artists that have also

been seminal to the project are Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, John Baldessari,

Robert Rauschenberg, Jeff Koons and Ashley Bickerton. They provide the historical

trajectory for the complicit/critical dynamic of art and entertainment that is explored

in this research. Christian Marclay, Stan Douglas, Phil Collins, Cory Arcangel, as

well as Australian artists like Tracey Moffatt, Soda_Jerk and Sam Smith, provide the

enlarged contemporary contexts for the research, along with the artists previously

singled out for discussion. All of these artists have contributed to the idea of the

digital-bricoleur that defines the methodology developed here. They connect and

make links in various and different ways between a diverse array of artefacts in

contemporary culture. They do this in ways that encourages audiences to question

and to connect with their own experiences of pop culture. In addition to establishing

this dialogue, artworks like Marclay’s The Clock (2010), Moffatt’s Doomed (2007)

and Revolution (2008) and Soda_Jerk’s entire oeuvre exemplify the kind of collage-

based formal strategies that are dependant on the kind of fannish consumption and

close reading of pop culture that I have discussed throughout this research. I consider

all these practices to be demonstrative of the ideas of fandom and the digital-

bricoleur in both practical and conceptual terms. My interest in these practices has

driven the research into varied conceptual, technical and formal approaches to art-

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making. This research connects with the theoretical and interpretive frameworks to

complete the methodological development that forms part of my contribution to new

knowledge. It is how these elements of research link together in practical terms –

how they generate the creative outcomes of the research – that will be discussed in

the following section.

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Chapter!4:!Creative!Practice! 65!

Chapter 4: Creative Practice

Creative Works

Over the course of this project a number of works have been significant in helping

me identify the various ideas, processes and approaches that form the intersecting

space of art and fandom being explored. These creative outcomes emerge out of my

affectual responses to pop culture through approaches to making and processes

enabled by digital-bricolage. It is also important to re-iterate that most of the creative

outcomes develop out of the habitual process of browsing the internet and following

numerous links from different RSS feeds that I encounter and subscribe to. It is also

here, as I discuss the creative outcomes of the project that the paradoxical nature of it

becomes apparent. This is because even though the activities of myself as fan, artist

(and academic) are inexorably folded across one another, I also have to consciously

separate out the different operations of my fandom and art practice into various sites

of containment, both conceptually and formally. This separation acts to control my

urge to endlessly consume material in an unchallenging way – my ‘overproximity’ –

and forces me to connect the conceptual and practical possibilities that come from

using these for more considered research and critical reflection. These connections

produce possibilities for making work, are options for exhibiting particular works

and are ideas on how to further develop the research and making processes. This

approach to partitioning off information, ideas and images (not unlike the

partitioning of a hard drive) gives me the space to assess the different ideas and

practical approaches to making that I’m developing. It allows me to consider how

these methods might be connected, disconnected and reconnected in different ways.

This link-making activity of digital-bricolage is a way for me to limit and control the

material I absorb through surfing the net. Otherwise I find that I can become

overwhelmed by my own compulsions and become creatively paralysed by “the

perpetual task of keeping inner and out reality separate yet inter-related” (Winnicott

quoted in Hills 2002, 104).

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66! Chapter!4:!Creative!Practice!

slow down mischa

An early example that illustrates these developments was slow down mischa (2006)

(see supplementary DVD or http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/slowdownmischa). In

this work I used interpolating slow-motion software to slow a fourteen-second

advertisement for Neutrogena brand face wash to three minutes. In the process, as

well as elongating the sound of Mischa Barton’s voice, the software distorted and

manipulated the image, amplifying the surreal and oddly sexualised nature of the

imagery. After exhibiting this work, I convinced myself that it was simply a slowed

down cosmetics advertisement, and despite receiving a positive response to it, I

rashly decided to avoid further use of slow-motion as a formal strategy because I

thought it was overly simplistic. At that stage, I still believed that complex processes

and production values were the key to successful art. However, on reflection, I

realise that the work contained many promising conceptual and formal possibilities

that I did not comprehend at the time. Although my first response was counter-

productive, I have since re-engaged with slow-motion techniques in a significant

way. This reconnection was very useful because it allowed me to think more clearly

about the various knots that make up the practice.

Figure 4.1. slow down mischa, 2007, stills from digital video, 3:00 mins

After reintroducing this as an idea and technical process I began to consider how this

earlier attempt to isolate one possibility for practice was driven by uninformed

presumptions and anxieties I had about the content of art. As I have already

discussed, this was also manifesting itself in my uncertainty about the relationship

between art and entertainment, and so I started to reconsider the various connections

and disconnections I was creating between different approaches to making art. I

began to recognise that the concepts, content and contexts I was negotiating in the

practice, were actually representative of my fannish addictions. I came to think of my

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practice as a space where I was trying to both manage and make sense of the often-

overwhelming nature of these compulsions. So, while my immediate response after

making slow down mischa was to sanction off what I saw as unsophisticated

technique and content, this was actually because I lacked the confidence to express

the affect associated with my fandom. As I discussed in Chapter 2, my rejection of

these affective impulses was based in my misinformed understanding of what

Rancière describes as art’s ‘historical mission’ (Carnevale and Kelsey 2007, 257).

Having since reconsidered these understandings with the benefit of further research,

reflection and contextualisation, I now understand the potential of both experiencing

and employing affect as a powerful expressive device for making art.

So, in the case of the slow-motion technique, I now understand it as a purposeful

strategy with which to extend for viewers – and myself – a moment of intense affect.

It can become a strategy through which I can explore and re-experience ‘what is at

play’ when enraptured by my fandom. The process of slowing down the

advertisement’s seductive imagery was an attempt to arrest the moment of

enchantment I first felt when viewing it. Like Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, the work

provided time and space for new experiences and understandings to emerge.

Reflectively reconsidering this work made me realise that the benefit in reassessing

the connections between ideas and technical processes in the practice. It allowed me

to get a better sense of these connections as potential ‘blind spots’ that I need to be

aware of when developing new work. It made me very aware of how important it is

to revisit works, and how necessary the reflective reassessment of works is to the

maturation and understanding of the practice itself. In a larger sense, it helped me

recognise how the connections and disconnections that make up the practice can be

more poetically and constructively developed as part of a digital-bricoleur

methodology.

every face on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995-2008

Another key work that allowed me to better understand how relationships between

content, affect and formal processes operate in the practice was every face on Vanity

Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995-2008 (2009-2012) (hereafter referred to as Every

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Face) (see supplementary DVD or http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/everyface).

This work began when I came across a retrospective collection of Annie Leibovitz’s

photographs on the website of the magazine Vanity Fair (2008). Looking at these

photos, I found myself caught up in a moment of positive affectual response, a

moment of blissful connection. The highly polished production values, the

sumptuous colour schemes, the aura of celebrity, and the overwhelming beauty of the

images seduced me. I was overridingly spellbound by – and complicit with – the

objects of my veneration. In the same way I use slow-motion to arrest and extend the

viewing experience, this affirmative, reverential experience became the catalyst for

creatively playing with the images in order to prolong this moment of affect. I was

aware that such images could represent my ‘passive identification’ with Guy

Debord’s idea of the ‘Spectacle’, but I was more interested in the way the seductive

aesthetic controlled my engagement with them. As I considered this contested space,

I also embarked on an extended period of formal experimentation. This visual and

temporal development came out of following and linking a series of creative

impulses and ‘hunches’ further discussed below. Importantly, this process

culminated in an outcome that I could not have anticipated or directed, and was only

possible because of the poetic and constructive sense of play enabled by a digital-

bricoleur methodology.

Figure 4.2. every face on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995-2008, 2009-2012, two-channel video installation with 2.1 channel sound, infinite loop, installation view

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As I mentioned earlier when discussing the link-making process, I came to the

retrospective collection of Leibovitz’s images on Vanity Fair's website through

surfing the internet. While I was already aware of these annual cover photographs, it

was only when I was presented with the images as a group that a moment of affect

occurred. In one visual space I was able to indulge in a sustained gaze with all the

images at once. My creative development of this work began by experimenting with

the simple digital operation of scaling the image to ‘zoom in’ on the faces of each

celebrity. As a starting point, I considered this strategy as an attempt to focus and

emphasise each celebrity’s absorbing gaze into Leibovitz’s lens, as it was this gaze

that continued to draw my attention above all other details. This strategy had two

accompanying aims: firstly, I chose this strategy to increase the pixelisation – and

consequent abstraction – of the image (which in itself was an effort to avoid my

usual obsessive-compulsive preference for high-definition imagery); secondly, by

recomposing the group portraits into individual ones, this action established a list or

database of separate portraits from which I could then draw to create a transformative

work. As I said earlier, this separating of elements into an ordered system contains

and orders what might otherwise become an overwhelming desire to incessantly

ramble across the ‘vastness’ of culture. This process of scaling and zooming is a

conceptual, formal and literal attempt to temporarily narrow the scope of my habits.

It suggests ways to structure, confine and parse the affective moment and the

subsequent creative compulsion. It also provides a way to move towards the critical

potential that close reading makes possible (which is not to say that either state is

ever completely abandoned). By focussing on and examining a singular image and

experience, by separating the celebrities in this way, I was trying to isolate this

positive affect, which was my desire for, and identification with, the transitional

object of celebrity.

Ultimately, the formal strategies of scaling and cropping the images were employed

in an almost literal attempt to connect with the images, to somehow commune with

them. However, in an apt reversal, by pixelating the image, this had a disconnecting

and visually obfuscating effect. This effect was further enhanced once the work was

developed through digitally morphing between each face. This technique emerged

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because I came across a software tutorial on image morphing during surfing between

motion-graphics websites. By connecting the links between this simultaneous

discovery of a software technique with the scaling and cropping of the images I was

working on, I was able to expand the formal and conceptual possibilities for the play

of images used. Ultimately, through playing with the parameters of the software, I

discovered that its ‘limitations’ could actually result in what I felt was a more

engaging, painterly, treatment of the image surface. The twists, contortions and

shears that ran across the image surface re-rendered the original faces almost

unrecognisable in parts. The resulting video created a tension between beauty and a

kind of abjection that had begun to emerge. Instead of the piercing and arresting gaze

of the celebrities, an array of contorted visages emerged; one that shifted between

partially formed portraits and formless abstractions.

While this process of scaling and morphing the images could be considered a kind of

Debordian détournement, the transformation of the portraits also speaks to the

affective processes of subjectification and identification associated with the

psychology of fandom. On reflection, my interrogation of these images became

almost a way of exorcising the affective hold that connected me to the original

images. By tearing these images apart, almost pixel-by-pixel, I was attempting to

wrest back a sense of agency in my act of looking; to take back what I had initially

given up in my complicit consumption. This approach to making became a way of

representing the concept of negotiating subjective and intersubjective tensions

present in my engagements as a fan. I was using my inherent creative compulsions to

probe into the materiality and experience of my affectivity to regain a sense of

critical focus as an artist. I became conscious of mining the potential for creative

critique within and through an intensely complicit engagement with those

experiences.

The next stage of making the work involved pairing this new kind of video group

portrait with a soundtrack. I had originally tried to match the un-morphed version of

the imagery with a simple orchestral soundtrack. However, I found the result

unsatisfying because I came to understand that there needed to be a kind of sensorial

harmony between the visual and aural aspects of the work. Through this, and my

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reading of the morphed imagery as formless and abstract, I felt that the imagery

should be matched with an ambient soundtrack – that the image and sound should

share these qualities in some way. I made a link between the imagery and a group of

pre-recorded ‘room tone’ sounds I had previously found in an existing sound library

on the internet. These sounds are recordings of empty spaces used to add

atmospheric ambience to film and television footage, which I combined and edited to

form a new soundtrack. On one level I found it conceptually pleasing to be using this

kind of ‘emptiness’ in conjunction with such artificial and staged photographs. But I

also understood that the sound could potentially experientially ‘open up’ the

‘flatness’ of the video image because of its origins as a literal, spatial, field

recording. Through very simple editing I discovered that I could construct a

soundtrack that created an ambience that was somewhat foreboding and visceral

when given the right conditions of display. This in turn emphasised the motion of the

images shearing and morphing across the screens and encouraged me to keep

exploring how sound has the capacity to shift and open up the experience of the

work, and to enhance its affective impact.

Installation

The installation of this work was extremely important in constructing the kind of

immersive space that could replicate or address my emotionally charged experience

as a fan. In fact, reflecting on this work has been essential to understanding the

fundamental importance of exploring the installation possibilities of all my video

work. The importance of developing this aspect of the practice is re-iterated through

Kate Mondloch’s observations in Screens (2010). She identifies a prevailing trend of

“screen-reliant art spectatorship” (2010, xvi) where the material specificities of

screen-based art are best considered in terms of their spectorial implications. She

stresses the importance of what she calls the screen/viewer ‘interface’;

[which] matters in the sense that it constitutes an essential component of the

artwork (the various dealings between spectators and the screen are

structural to the work), but also because the body-screen interface is a

phenomenal form in itself as well as a constitutive part of an embodied

visual field. (2010, 4)

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I had always considered the use of various display methods for different works.

However, this idea, in particular of thinking of screens as being ‘constitutive’ and

‘essential’ to embodied affectual possibilities, resonated strongly with my own

ambitions for the works developing in the project. Mondloch also clearly articulated

an affinity for the conceptual and contextual territory that I was exploring as the

connoisseur fan and digital-bricoleur, as she suggests,

[c]ritical activity in what we might call our society of the screen requires a

more nuanced approach. ... [A] media art practice and criticism that is

cognizant of the interimplicated relationship between screen objects, screen

spaces, and viewing bodies is better prepared to confront the challenges

(artistic, ethical, or otherwise) of the shifting connections among them.

(2010, 94)

I felt that this observation echoed Drucker’s ideas about complicity and criticality

and Hills’ conceptions of scholar-fans. As such, I was interested in more carefully

considering how these ideas were linked to the various implications of

intersubjective experiences of the ‘society of the screen’ and how my installations

could address the ‘shifting connections between them’. That is, how the spatial and

temporal experience of an artwork could open up a multiplicity of conceptual,

formal, psychological, and even phenomenological, considerations for a viewer.

Every Face became a kind of test-bed work, where variations of image, sound, scale

and space were manipulated in order to creatively play and critically respond to these

ideas and with the notions of spectatorship and affectual experience.

While I originally created this work as a single-channel video, that version failed to

excite me or effectively express any of these ideas I have discussed above. It was

only once reconfigured into two-channel form and installed with large-scale

projections in a suitable space with the appropriate technical conditions that I better

understood the potential of the work. Out of this experience, I have now been able to

develop and articulate strategies that exploit the cinematic references and

experiential potentialities at play in this and other works. The experimentation with

the visual, aural and spatial elements of installation enhanced the affective

possibilities of the work. It also connected with other understandings of screen

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installation, including the ideas of “synaesthetic cinema” introduced by Gene

Youngblood in Expanded Cinema (1970, 75).

Youngblood’s pioneering discussion of how various screen practices expand on the

language of traditional narrative film has been important because it further developed

some of the ideas and process I was engaging with in the work. I was excited by his

identification of multi-screen installations as primarily concerned with kinaesthetic

or sensorial effects. I am particularly interested in his somewhat poetic assertion that

this idea of ‘synaesthetic cinema’ had an evocative potential to connect a viewer with

a shared “oceanic consciousness” (1970, 92). Notwithstanding this grand idea, in my

practice I understand this potential as related to the capacity of art to draw out

intersubjective understandings from a viewer through affectual means. Youngblood

suggests that ‘synaesthetic cinema’ is a practice that brings together varied sensory

stimulations of sight, sound and bodily experience to create an effect far greater than

the sum of these parts. He contends that such a process

produces a sense of kinaesthesia that evokes in the inarticulate conscious of

the viewer recognition of an overall pattern-event that is in the film itself as

well as the ‘subject’ of the experience. Recognition of this pattern-event

results in a state of oceanic consciousness. (1970, 110-111)

This poetic idea of a screen installation that can evoke in a viewer a negotiation of

various intersubjective perspectives is one that I find compelling. This is especially

the case given that, as Youngblood paraphrases artist Carolee Schneemann, this

evocative recognition occupies a space “between desire and experience” (1970, 92).

For me, this also resonates with my own efforts to produce screen-viewing

experiences that express both the almost ineffable seduction and desire present in my

engagements with pop culture, but also the anxiously complicated and contradictory

creative drive to critique these experiences.

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Figure 4.3. Installation diagram of The Art of Being a Fan, The Block, QUT, 28-30 March 2012

Given these ideas of synaesthetic experience, in the presentation of Every Face I was

concerned with combining cinematic references and experiences of place, what

Janine Marchessault describes as a bringing together of “temporal flow and spatial

fixity” (2007, 41). The relationships between the sound, video and screen-installation

were all important sites of creative and critical play. Through the particular

arrangement of these screens in the main space of The Block (see Figure 4.3), I was

inviting the viewer’s ‘interaction’ with the works by encouraging their movement

towards the screens as well as through a ‘gateway’ between them. Thinking about

this was prompted by an idea that Angela Ndalianis (via Gilles Deleuze) has termed

as a ‘neo-baroque’ architecture of vision (2003, 358). As with Baroque art of the 17th

Century, she suggests that the dynamic arrangement of video screens invites a kind

of spatially interactive viewing experience. The effect of this interaction is a kind of

dissolution of the image frame and an ‘opening up’ of the video image (2003, 358).

In a conceptual sense,

[t]he notion of the ‘passive spectator’ as voyeur collapses when media

experiences immerse the viewer in spectacles that aim at perceptually

removing the presence of the frame. (2003, 358-359)

every face on Vanity Fair’s Hollywood covers 1995-2008two-channel HD video, 2011, infinite loop

not to scale

Top Ten Box Office Blockbusters of All Time, in Dollarsten-channel SD video, 2012, duration varies

running menthree-channel HD video, 2012, infinite loop

In The Loft:The passage of indeterminacy in the intensification of beingHD video, 2012, 48 mins

The Art of being a FanDaniel McKewen

PhD Final ExhibitionThe Block, QUT28-30 March 2012

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This invitation to interact provides “models of perception that suggest worlds of

infinity that lose the sense of a centre”, where instead the viewer’s “active

engagement... orders the illusion” of the image (2003, 358). So, unlike traditional

cinematic theory, which frames audiences as passive consumers, with this

installation I was exploring how to complicate the spectacle of the cinematic image

through making the viewer aware of their own active engagement with it – and in it.

In practical terms, Every Face was installed with some soft seating to invite

protracted viewing. However, there was also a soft strip of light cast onto the floor

between and beyond the screens. This was planned to act as an invitation for the

viewer to move towards, and through, the gateway, or ‘threshold’, between the

screens. In doing so, they would face a spatial void, with the shifting video

occupying only their peripheral vision. Passing through to the other side of the

screens was designed in order to create a potentially disorienting experience in a dark

and formless space until they came upon the other two installation rooms.

Conversely, returning from the rest of the exhibition meant emerging from this void

into bright projected light, which aimed to have a similarly disorienting effect. The

intention was for the viewer to be able to shift their interaction and perspective, in a

literal and metaphorical sense, from viewing both screens at once to the immersive

position of filling their field of vision. In this way, the installation aimed to provide

for the viewer an opportunity to experientially engage with the affective

complications I face as an artist/fan.

To some extent, then, this installation represented an attempt to have viewers

‘reconstruct’ their ‘relationship between places and identities, spectacles and gazes,

proximities and distances’ in a way Rancière might suggest (2007, 259). I was also

considering Kate Mondloch’s idea that there is a more complicated idea of spatial

and temporal interaction at play in the use of screens in contemporary art. That

alongside their emancipatory potential,

media screens are also capable of generating oppressive viewing conditions

that strictly delimit the viewer's interaction with the work. ... [Screens] can

offer a sort of siren song – calling spectators to largely involuntary

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behaviour, entreating them to look and pay attention and to discipline

themselves and their bodies in the process. (2010, xix)

Indeed, Mondloch (drawing from curator and critic Daniel Birnbaum) emphasises

that screen-based installation should reflect the consideration of “installing time” in

space (2010, 40). She combines the discourses around cinema and contemporary art

to argue that spatial and temporal considerations of screen-based art can critique

traditionally linear conceptions of the screen-viewing experience. Non-narrative

artworks especially, invite the viewer to engage in a kind of conceptual interactivity

– their reading of the work is essential to create meaning. By encouraging such

multivalent non-linear experiences for the viewer, these artworks create new

understandings of subjectivity as “an open-ended, durational process” (2010, 53).

Through these ideas, the installation of Every Face investigated the complicated and

intersubjective tensions between ideas of passive screen-consumption and active,

participatory screen-based critique of that consumption. It also explored the

potentially contrasting notions of spectacularity and temporal experience, and spatial

emancipation and discipline discussed above. While I consider these ideas to have

informed the installation, it is also important to highlight that I do not consider them

to be the exclusive conceptual ideas operating in the work. Just as I have discussed

using Lev Manovich’s principles of new media as practical art-making strategies,

these varied discussions about screen installation suggest broad ideas and ways of

working for the practice. Rather than forming a unified theory of installation

practice, these ideas leave open new potentials and creative possibilities for display.

The use of sound was equally important in this installation’s ability to emphasise

immersive, affective potential, and create an elastic sense of time and space. The

speakers were positioned to emit sound as if from the screen, the subwoofer designed

to gently vibrate the floor and the curtaining designed to produce an acoustically

resonant space. This installation design was quite consciously considered in order to

contribute to the bodily experience of the work. As well as creating a visceral

viewing experience, I wanted the work to be ‘opened up’, or further enhanced by the

sound’s resonance in the cavernous space of The Block. This idea relied on playing

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with the soundtrack’s ambient, omni-directional capabilities. As Stephen Crocker

suggests, the inherent multiplicities present in hearing a reverberating sound, expand

the reception of an artwork beyond a singularly visual one, reminding the viewer of

the phenomenological aspects of cultural consumption (2007, 56). Because of this, I

was interested in the sound’s ability to suggest a kind of a vast but ‘de-located’ space

as a way of responding to the kind of disorienting and overwhelming sense of mass

culture that is common to my everyday experience.

This sense of vastness in the experience of the work is also dependant on the scale of

the video projection in a dark and cinematic space. Haidee Wasson has described

projection screens as having an inherently understood ‘fluidity’. Because viewers

subconsciously understand video projection as ‘expandable’ to fit any screen size,

she suggests that the video image can be read and experienced as potentially

‘infinite’. Moreover, such ‘infinite’ readings of video projections can even become

sublime experiences for the viewer (2007, 85). Wasson describes this sublime

potential of the screen in terms derived from Edmund Burke’s writing on the topic.

The sublime offers simultaneously astonishment and admiration, wonder and

pain. It is both illuminating and terrifying, underscored by the contradictory

appeal of the infinite. Its seductive force invites surrender to its wonders as

well as to its disordered horror. (2007, 85)

I was particularly excited by this idea because it suggests that the experiential

potentials of screen and sound installation can mirror for a viewer the kinds of

simultaneous, ambivalent and conflicting affective responses that I experience as an

artist/fan. In practical terms, I was interested in using the scale of the projections in a

light controlled space, and the heavily amplified soundtrack to create a cinematic

spectacle of sorts as well as a spatially immersive experience for the viewer. In doing

so, I was aiming to evoke an affective experience that could reference my own

seductive and complicated experience of the Vanity Fair images – the starting point

for the work.

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The passage of indeterminacy in the intensification of being

The passage of indeterminacy in the intensification of being (2011-) (hereafter

referred to as Passage) (see supplementary DVD or http://vimeo.com/daniel

mckewen/passage) is a work that came about through an ambivalent affective

response, a simultaneous sense of attraction and repulsion to encountering Katy

Perry’s music video California Gurls (Perry 2010). Like Every Face, this work

demonstrates how my initial obsessive fascination with an aspect of pop culture

becomes recontextualised through my art-making. However, this work-in-progress is

also demonstrative of the importance of the reflective processes in my practice. This

further period of reflective creative development has allowed me to reinterpret my

fascination by focussing on the peripheral elements of the video production rather

than the iconic image of Perry. Consequently this process of a more nuanced

examination of all the elements that make up the source material has generated

several new versions of the work.

In the original video, Perry and her dancers are cast as vampish boardgame pieces

who are imprisoned and manipulated by the pimp-king-as-game-player Snoop Dogg.

In the video narrative, his schemes are thwarted and his gummi-bear army defeated

when Perry ejaculates from her Murakami-like breast-mounted, whipped-cream cans.

My ambivalent response to the video stemmed from my annoyance at its problematic

representation of women to its target audience, the garish production values, and its

conspicuous attempt at self-aware parody. This displeasure operated in tandem with

my ‘embarrassing’ attraction to Perry, who reclines seductively half naked on cotton-

candy clouds. But, crucially, it was only through the processes of reflecting on and

remaking this work that the precise nature of this state of ambivalence became clear

to me.

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Figure 4.4. The passage of indeterminacy in the intensification of being, 2011- ,

single-channel video installation with 2.1 channel sound, 48 mins, installation view Photograph: Carl Warner

In the work, I employed intentionally laborious techniques of frame-by-frame motion

tracking and frame-interpolating slow-motion plug-ins. This allowed me to stretch

the original four-minute duration out to forty-eight-minutes and to reframe every shot

to a close-up of Perry’s face. Similar to the work slow down mischa this hyper-

extension of the running time literally gave me more time to explore my attraction to

Perry; to create an intimate relationship to her image. At the same time, the scaling

up of other sections of the video to the point of abstraction became interesting as a

way to treat the video in a more painterly sense. Importantly, it was through

exhibiting this version of the work that I was also able to recognise that my initial

insistence of using all the motion-tracked close-ups of Perry interfered with my

ability to draw out the other possibilities for recontextualising this work. This is why

I consider the work to still be very much in-progress, because each time I come back

to it I am considering new ways to interpret and remake it (hence the open-ended

date).

The version of the work included in the PhD exhibition reconfigured the original

single-channel version described in the previous paragraph into a grid of nine

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channels of video. While the elongated audio and duration remained the same, each

section of the grid featured a re-edit of my original video. In this re-edit, I had re-

scaled and re-cropped each shot to further abstract the majority of the imagery. This

drawing out of new aesthetic possibilities was an attempt to move beyond the ‘blind

spot’ of my desire for Perry. I also realised that although the garish colours and

production design of the original music video initially repulsed me, remixing these

peripheral elements created unexpected and seductive arrangements of the visual and

temporal relationships between the various segments of the grid. This process of

digitally re-scaling the image also further fragmented the original video frame and

highlighted the textural qualities amplified through digital compression. Through

playing further with random synchronisations of image and sound it also created

different fields of colour, shape, texture, tone and line that became arranged and

disarranged. Going forward in the practice, the potential for keeping works ‘open’ to

new reworking is already being more fully developed in this, and other, new video

works that have emerged from this research.

This ‘open-ness’ to the emerging and varied formal and conceptual possibilities of

the work has also been informed by Timothy Murray’s ideas in Digital Baroque

(2008). Murray draws on Gilles Deleuze’s ideas of the ‘fold’ to discuss the ways

that new media artworks can gather (or fold) together varied perspectives in the

creation of new intersubjective experiences. For Murray, the fold is a space of

“multiple becomings” that functions as “the machinery of intersubjectivity and inter-

activity” (2008, 6). His Deleuzian use of the term complicates Cartesian models of

the Self, suggesting that the subjectivisation process is a folding of the Other across

itself (2008, 5-8). I think of this idea as similar to Zizek’s framing of subjectivity as a

continual questioning of ‘What am I to others?’. Crucially, in the way Murray

conceptually and metaphorically folds this idea of ‘multiple becomings’ across art

history’s baroque sensibilities he constructs a kind of digital baroque. Here, he

suggests new media art practices can play an essential role in moving “away from

centered subjectivity [and towards] energized information relay” (2008, 46). I think

of this idea as connected to both Ndalianis’ and Mondloch’s ideas about the

emancipatory potential of screen installation, particularly about how artworks require

a viewer to negotiate, interact, and create new intersubjective readings and spatio-

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temporal engagements. I am interested in this poetic notion of ‘energized information

relays’ because it suggests ways to design and develop innovative installation spaces

for encouraging intersubjective perspectives and experiences to be generated that

account for the shared and fluid nature of culture.

The ideas discussed above are compelling because they reverberate with the same

approaches to practice that the digital-bricoleur enacts. There are clear connections

to the connective, information ordering processes of this project, and particularly the

intersubjective understandings it aims to generate. These ideas poetically stimulate

the creation, exploration and communication of the various meanings and

experiences possible in the practice. This is seen in Passage, through the way in

which the grid of separate images folded together to reconfigure the temporal and

formal spaces of both the original music video, and my first appropriated version.

This fracturing and layering of both the running time and the image, served to

represent numerous sides of my ambivalent reading at once. By displaying the

abstracted elements alongside the extreme close-ups of Perry’s face, the different

perspectives that these edited frames could represent generated a multiplicity of

formal and conceptual dialogues between and amongst themselves. These conceptual

and formal reconsiderations come from the material and technical processes used to

dissect and edit the original object – and they have opened up new ways for me to re-

think the creative and critical possibilities for it. The potential for this open-ended

process is that it can stimulate the generation of divergent perspectives that exist

outside of my initial fascination with the material. This conceptually and creatively

generative capacity is what I have found to be most productive for on-going research

and practice.

The purpose of addressing this work-in-progress in this exegesis is to highlight the

complicated psychological relationship I initially have to the source material I use,

and how this operates performatively in the practice. It aims to articulate how my

affectual engagements can develop conceptual and formal ‘blind spots’, but also to

how in the act of reflecting on these engagements, analysing the processes and

approaches to making work, and subsequently remaking works – these performative

activities can generate new unexpected creative outcomes. By being attentive to the

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material and technical operations – the practice-led research – these ‘blind spots’ can

be identified and carefully considered in relation to the other creative and critical

perspectives that I also research.

This process of performed research enables me to more clearly articulate the

spectrum that exists between complicit and critical cultural engagements, and it

allows a more refined ‘conversation’ between the content and contexts of the

practice. In this way, Passage serves as a snapshot of my practice as a whole. It

demonstrates how the performance of making artwork can unpack the complicated

affective relationships involved in it, and how these relationships generate creative

outcomes from the process of negotiating that affectivity. It shows how creative play

within the space of fandom can reconfigure such engagements in selective, critical

ways without opposing or rejecting the affective charge of the original engagement.

As I have said, this particular instance of my making process also demonstrates the

importance of a reflective mode of practice – the re-watching, installing,

reconfiguring, re-making, discussing and critiquing of work – in order to identify the

possibilities and complexities involved in exploiting fan behaviours to develop a

creative practice.

Running Men

A group of works that reveal a more resolved understanding of the tensions that arise

in the re-imaginings of my fanatical pursuits is the ongoing series Running Men (see

supplementary DVD or http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen/runningmen). Perhaps

because they are framed by the cinematic trope of suspense, these works illustrate the

most familiar of my affectual experiences that I discussed earlier: anxiety. The

videos helped me make sense of this psychological experience, as well as allowing

me to further recognise how my actions as a fan inform my research as a digital-

bricoleur.

When creating these particular works I edited and rotoscoped footage of memorable

scenes of male actors I identified with: Cary Grant, Harrison Ford and Tom Cruise.

These videos were turned into infinitely looping scenes of running, trapping these

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actors in a kind of Nietschzean eternal recurrence. While in theory the process of

cutting, looping and ‘painting’ out the background is relatively uncomplicated, the

actual process of constructing an effective loop and convincingly rotoscoping the

figure can be labourious and time-consuming. As with most of the reflection and

analysis on the practice over the course of the project, I have come to understand the

importance of these time-consuming and technical approaches to making art. These

extended periods of assembling and editing work provide the space for carefully

considering the affectual impulses that drive them. They become sites for a kind of

distanced exploration and analysis. This method and approach to practice acts as a

meditative space for me – a space of forced withdrawal. It establishes the site from

which I can negotiate (and even temporarily escape from) my anxious and

overwhelming affectual experiences of culture. In the same way that I discussed the

making of Passage, in this space of often-repetitive activity the technical and

material operations of the practice are fore-grounded. This space, partitioned off, as it

were, from the distractions of my usual habits, provides a site for making that

initiates new patterns of thinking about the appropriated content. So, along with

constructing a space to make sense of these experiences, this process also provides

an opportunity to consider the kind of intersubjective responses (that I have earlier

discussed) that I hope to elicit from viewers.

Figure 4.5. Running Men, 2008- ,

three-channel video installation, infinite loop, installation view Photograph: Carl Warner

The running cary work (2008) (see supplementary DVD or http://vimeo.com/daniel

mckewen/runningcarytext) that forms part of this series originally took the form of a

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re-appropriation of Hitchcock’s famous crop-duster scene from North by Northwest

(1959). However, instead of the iconic swooping plane, I inserted my own

ambiguous text to endlessly chase Grant. As with my initial response to slow down

mischa, I was uneasy with what I thought to be the over-simplification in the work.

What I failed to realise at the time was that, in fact, the work was not simplified

enough, and this unease was really symptomatic of my increasing anxiety about

using this as the content of the practice. I now recognise that this was also

symptomatic of the larger sense of general anxiety that is a very real and often all

pervasive psychological experience in my everyday life. I have come to understand

that each of these characters acts as a surrogate for the various aspects of my own

anxieties – they become allegorical projections of how I often feel about my

subjective social experiences. I also recognise that the series operates beyond this

surrogate role and operates affectively beyond my own self-consciousness; that it

potentially functions intersubjectively – not just for my own process of

subjectivisation, but for others as well.

This discussion of my subjective experience is important because it is part of the way

that the work enables me to make sense of how and why the practice works. It has

allowed me to link together the often-paradoxical elements that drive the

compulsions and creative activities that make up the project. It articulates how the

role of the digital-bricoleur is folded across the psychoanalytical reading of fan

behaviours that Hills discusses. The choices involved in these works – the choice of

the actor and/or character, the choice of the appropriated shot and the method of

editing chosen – are connected to create a kind of self-portrait of myself as

overwhelmed and anxious. These choices are also significant because they

demonstrate how I can potentially develop new representations of these emotions

through my approach to making art.

The particular actors selected represent various conceptions of masculinity, but as I

read them, these are confused and disconcerting understandings of identity, both

within the narrative of the films, as well as between these screen-based presences and

the actor’s real lives. Through my connoisseur-fan research I have identified with

and have carefully considered the dichotomies present between Harrison Ford, the

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famous actor, and Indiana Jones, his character (Spielberg 1981). On the one hand,

Ford is an action-star and Jones a globe-hopping-adventurer, but on the other hand

Ford is renowned as a grumpy old actor and Jones leads another life as a leather-

patched tweed wearing professor. As such, I am interested in, and inspired by, the

ability to be both heroic and studiously mundane. I also vicariously identify with

Tom Cruise’s rich-playboy character in Vanilla Sky (Crowe 2002). Here is a

character that cannot tell reality from a dream, yet I was also considering at the same

time my fascination and disdain for the similar character – Tom Cruise, multi-

millionaire Scientologist. I have also pondered at length the implications of Grant’s

famous quote “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant – even I want to be Cary Grant”

(quoted in Beauchamp and Bachrach, 2010 para. 30). As part of these works, I was

grappling with the idea that these various representations are bound up in fictions

that also very much inform my experience of the world. I had to consider how, as a

fan, the spaces between lived and vicarious experience inform and affect my

approaches to creatively engaging in a dialogue with popular culture.

As I developed these works I began to see more clearly how they represented my

anxious and protracted attempts at negotiating the world in general, and I recognised

that much of this was also about how I relate to representations of masculinity and

identity in pop culture. So, by having these avatars running in endless loops, my

surrogates are caught in a somewhat self-absorbed space of relentless confusion and

paranoia – running with, and from, anxiety. They are never caught by their unseen

shadows, and they also stare past us (me), unable to catch up to an unseen goal, to be

safe. Despite their character’s predicaments, as celebrities, I ‘identify’ with them and

seek to emulate them. I am mesmerised by them, yet I also recognise that they are

fictions in the media sphere, both real and ethereal, and impossible to grasp. These

actors also mirror my own conundrum – they are trapped in an endless cycle and

cannot rest. Yet, paradoxically, the rhythmic looping that I set them in – their

suspension in a constant state of flight – is where I am able to find moments to lose

myself in the scene and momentarily transcend my own anxious thoughts. I am able

to relax, suspend my own disbelief and escape my own confusion with the world.

This repetitive action also provides the kind of contemplative space I previously

referred to with the editing processes I employ, as a space for meditative reflection.

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In turn, this work also opened up the possibility for more focussed research over the

rest of the project about all the kinds of elastically temporal experiences of screen

culture.

In the doctoral exhibition of this series of work, I was interested in creating the

opportunity for a similarly reflective temporal experience that I had when

constructing the loops themselves. I wanted to play with the rhythmic qualities of

looping footage to explore how it might (paradoxically) reproduce the kind of

anxiousness that the fleeing characters represent – along with the stable,

contemplative, space that the repetition of the loop provides for me. In particular, I

was interested in how the extremely short duration (ranging from 1.5 to 3.5 seconds)

of these loops might draw out different kinds of temporal and visual engagements for

a viewer than a much longer video would. This exploration of the rhythms and

repetition in daily life – which came from my own experience of first viewing these

images then re-making them into artwork – began me thinking about using the

stability or instability of time as a way of generating affect. As Klaus Biesenbach has

pointed out when discussing the prominence of the video loop in contemporary art,

[w]ith seemingly infinite freedom of choice, a recurring action becomes a

stabilising factor for the people of the First World... [t]ime appears to be

tangible and serviceable, a phenomenon capable of being influenced,

lengthened or repeated. (quoted in Mondloch, 2010, 58)

In these works I was also interested in playing with this idea of the loop’s recursive

qualities that, as Biesenbach suggests, give the loop its phenomenological dimension

and can present a ‘stabilising’ and meditative experience. However, I was also

interested in amplifying a foreboding quality in the work by representing the same

‘trapped’ scenario on multiple screens. By presenting these silent and short (but

conceptually infinite) videos, as I did in the PhD exhibition, I wanted to investigate

the tensions that might exist between these temporal engagements and the

visual/spatial scenarios represented. Here I was thinking of Mondloch’s idea that in

screen-art installation,

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the time-shifting mobile spectator appears to be a close relative of the

contemporary media subject; both are lost in yet determinedly struggling for

the control of their experiences with screen-based technologies. (2010, 58)

I think of the tension between these two experiences – of being ‘lost in’ and

attempting to ‘control’ these moments – as aptly describing my own experiences of

consuming popular culture, as well as the meditative spaces of making the work. In

Running Men I wanted to ‘open up’ this puzzling experience to the viewer in ways

related to, but different from, Every Face. Where that work explored the spatial and

bodily experience of screens and video, Running Men was concerned with addressing

the idea of time, in order to create a reflective space concerned not with affective

spectacle so much as temporal affectivity.

Top Ten Box Office Blockbusters of All Time, in Dollars

Another group of works that have been central to the overall aims of the project is

the series Top Ten Box Office Blockbusters of All Time, in Dollars (2010-) (hereafter

referred to as Top Ten) (see supplementary DVD or http://vimeo.com/daniel

mckewen/topten). This is an ongoing project that displays and updates the annual top

ten grossing ‘blockbuster’ films. These works conflate the psychological

engagements I have with symbolic representations of culture and the fascination I

have for the business of entertainment. The videos foreground the monetary value of

these films by superimposing both the budget and the gross profit dollar figures onto

the image of the film. These figures are then animated using software code to

automate the dollar amount’s growth over the running-time of each film. With this

series, I was (and am) exploring my escapist-desire that is fulfilled by watching these

films, and playing with this across my meta-fascination in box-office data and

entertainment industry news. I also wanted to explore the tensions that exist between

my complicity as a consumer watching these films and my critical recognition of

them being spectacle as culture.

The impetus for making this series of works was to formally and conceptually

experiment with the economic data associated with these blockbusters. I wanted to

examine whether my affectual experience of watching them could be obscured or

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overwhelmed by how their extraordinary popularity was measured financially. This

approach was also a way to reflect on what box-office returns might mean as a

marker, or perception, of each film’s culturally symbolic value or worth, and what

that meant for my relationship to these things as an artist. I was interested in trying to

comprehend what the arbitrary and abstract dimension of the economic transactions

involved in these cultural products meant. This process became about my inability to

comprehend these overwhelming sums of money, and the spectacle of these billion-

dollar consumer products in light of my own financial reality. As with so much of the

other works on my practice, this exploration was driven by the often ironic and vexed

relationship I have with pop culture and the paradoxical dilemmas I face as an

artist/fan. I was fascinated in the way that the growth of expenditure and revenue that

mass-produced entertainment uses becomes a marker of creative success, yet there

are so few opportunities as an artist to basically support oneself from a creative

practice. So I thought about trying to factually measure and tabulate this

phenomenon somehow – as a way to make it ‘real’ or give it a material form through

which I could explore it. I was interested in creatively linking this data back to the

source of its narrative as it were – to fold the beginning and the (continuing) end over

one another. I also felt that the most appropriate site for these narratives to be

unpacked was through the use of the monitor, rather than as projection, because,

despite the significance of these movies being rated in box office returns, the most

ubiquitous experience I have of them, through repeated viewing, is screen-based –

TV, PC, laptop, iPad, iPhone, etcetera. So this choice was about reflecting the

abstract space of these financial markers back into the (inter)personal, private and

intimate spaces of such screen-based experiences.

Figure 4.6. Top Ten Box Office Blockbusters of All Time, in Dollars, 2009- , ten-channel video installation with sound, infinite duration, installation view

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These works also became about exploring how Manovich’s principles of new media

could inform the practical and conceptual making strategies that I wanted to use in

approaching the work (as I discussed in the contextual review above). I liked the idea

of playing with his ideas about numerical representation (in the dollar amounts),

database aesthetics (the box-office data) and automation (my use of generative video

plug-ins) when making these works. Strategically, using these tropes opened up

unexpected viewing and affectual experiences for me, and these will be employed to

develop future works. All kinds of engaging moments emerge for me in these

montages: smaller moments such as when a close-up of Harry Potter’s face is neatly

framed within a dollar amount (Yates 2011), or larger experiences such as all ten

films and soundtracks playing at once and merging into a surprising moment of joint

narrative signification.

Crucially, these moments also form a critique of these films and present to the viewer

an opportunity to reassess what the films might mean and represent. As an example,

by literally framing Harry Potter with an abstract representation of his ‘real worth’,

the videos creates images that complicates the film’s fantastical narratives and

escapist potential. By presenting all these films simultaneously, the installation also

aimed at prompting the viewer to critically consider the cultural homogeneity of

Hollywood film. By filling the audience’s frame of view, the films can be clearly

seen to reflect each other in construction. Their editing rhythms, colour palettes,

production design, soundtrack cues, dialogue and narrative structure can be

compared, and similarities and differences assessed. While in these ways the series

operates to critically lay things bare, there also exists for me a complicit attraction

towards escapist enjoyment. In their overwhelming simultaneity, the videos reveal

these sorts of moments as condensing all my fanatical desires, creative impulses and

critical readings of these films into a moment of jouissance, so that, like Running

Men, the work still operates affectively for me. At any time, while one layer of

experience can be understood as dispassionately presenting the ‘data’ generated by

these films, I still want to look ‘through’ this layer and revel in my enjoyment of

them. So this series of works also opens up a different part of the practice – of

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generating further creative possibilities out of this complicated experience, rather

than from the spaces of anxiety or desire as with other works.

While earlier incarnations of Top Ten displayed the films in a sequential show-reel

on a single projection, as I have addressed, the simultaneous display of the films

significantly emphasised the conceptual and experiential terrain that the work

operates in. Again, this is similar to the ideas of Haidee Wasson that I discussed in

relation to Every Face – the display of ten films, with ten soundtracks, and twenty

ever-increasing dollar-figures, all playing at once, was aimed at producing a

potentially expansive, and perhaps overwhelmingly immersive, experience. It was

intended to resonate visually and conceptually with the overlapping virtual windows

and multiple video streams through which I negotiate popular culture. As with my

own experiences as artist/fan, I also wanted the viewer to shift between an active

attempt to read and hear the individual films and dollar-amounts and a passive

experience, a flow of colour, movement and a wall of sound. I was interested in

exploring the idea of the “contemporary media subject [as a] time-shifting mobile

spectator” – as being at once overwhelmed and lost, while also searching for control

of the space (Mondloch 2010, 58). To amplify this experience, I utilised the

‘baroque’ potential of multi-screen installation in order to “suggest worlds of

infinity” in which the viewer might “lose the sense of centre that is traditionally

associated with classically ordered space” (Ndalianis 2003, 358). Importantly for the

nature of these blockbuster films, this baroque sensibility is grounded in the primacy

of visual spectacularity. In this work, I was attempting to render the space more

baroque through the excessive installation of the work, through offering up;

multiple, shifting viewpoints and narrative perspectives ... which operate to

collapse the classical function of the frame. ... [This] permit[s] a greater flow

between the inside and outside, and operate[s] according to a polycentric

logic. (Ndalianis 2003, 360)

This idea of a polycentric reception of the work also relates back to Murray’s

discussion of the digital baroque. In the practice, I am continually re-considering the

dynamics of folding the passive/active, surface/depth and collapsed/expanded

!


experiences and elements of culture across one another in order to better understand

the spectrum of possibilities they can offer up, rather than simply thinking of them as

simple binaries. Here, I am reflecting on Murray’s appropriation of the Deleuzian

term “incompossible” (2008, xi) as,

elements of thought and art that can fail to converge while still not negating

or rendering each other impossible. Rather than either converging or

remaining impossible for each other, rather than being included or excluded,

they stand in paradoxical relation to one another as divergent and coexistant”

(2008, 248)

This idea is exciting for me because it also so clearly articulates many of the

conceptual and practical approaches to practice that I have been developing through

the methodology. This complex yet elegant unpacking of the paradoxical relationship

between myself as a fan and artist has been powerfully reaffirming for my own

ambitions. It has allowed me to consolidate the varied activities of the digital

bricoleur into a methodology that is simultaneously ‘divergent’ yet ‘coexistant’ –

both complicit and critical without ‘negating or remaining impossible for each other’.

Top Ten Box Office Blockbusters of All Time, in Dollars was intended as an

exploration and expression of how these ideas might operate as a multi-screen

experience. How an overblown homage to escapist fantasy can have that affectual

experience ‘punctured’ (or deflated) through the profit ‘clock’ running across the

screen of the spectacle as it were. I also thought it became important to use relatively

small-scale LCD screens that would be reminiscent of a more domestic environment.

By referencing the idea of ‘home-theatre’ systems, I was also considering the idea

that such screens might be unable to conceptually and formally contain such usually

cinematically-scaled blockbuster films. I was exploring the notion of both

‘collapsing’ and ‘expanding’ the screen/frames and the spaces within them into a

multivalent space-time – of presenting large things in small spaces. I wanted to

encourage the viewer to consider how these ‘multiple, shifting viewpoints and

narrative perspectives’ might operate, and to reflect on their own understandings and

engagements with popular blockbuster entertainment. Importantly, however, the way

in which technical and formal aspects of this work folded across the conceptual and

contextual starting points generated the conditions for other new links and

!


unexpected works to develop. The work discussed below was one of those

unexpected discoveries.

Conditions of compromise and failure

Some of the most recent creative outputs of the project, such as Conditions of

compromise and failure (2011-2012), have emerged during the latter stages of this

project and have been influenced by a more considered understanding of how the

practice-led research actually generates new opportunities to think outside the

tensions it began with. As mentioned above, this comes from linking the various

approaches and methods of making that come from digital-bricolage to this notion of

the ‘incompossible’. I can now see more clearly how these new works are derived

from the often contradictory conditions that the practice explores as it seams together

the concepts, contexts and media used in the research. As I have also discussed the

practice often involves lengthy reflective periods to help refine and resolve the

creative outputs. So, while one of these new works will be discussed here, and one

was briefly addressed in the Methodology chapter, I expect they will continue to

form and re-form beyond this doctorate. The inclusion here of this in-progress

reflection is intended to indicate the new directions and working methods that are

emerging from the research.

Figure 4.7. Conditions of compromise and failure, 2011-2012,

mixed media, dimensions vary, installation view

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This work, Conditions of compromise and failure, came about through my desire to

re-invest in physical media – through the experiences of working in the physical

spaces of installation and display over the last eighteen months or so – and my

repeated immersions in the television program The Wire (Simon 2004) over the same

period. The emotional attachment I have with this show is astounding. I became so

invested with its Byzantine narrative about American urban decay woven together

over sixty hours of episodes that I felt compelled to creatively respond to it. In

homage, this work was an attempt to map out every named character from all five

seasons, their systemic allegiances and their narrative connections to each other.

Initially, this work was an almost at-wits-end attempt to connect with both my

prolonged affectual engagement with the show, but also my very real despondence at

having finished watching the series for a second time. Previous attempts to link this

affect with any kind of digital process had not resonated with me, and it was only

when I thought about the material conditions I had been working with outside of the

screen-based processes that I habitually employed, that I finally developed a sense of

how the work could be made.

Figure 4.8. Conditions of compromise and failure, 2011-2012,

mixed media, dimensions vary, detail view

!


What I eventually realised was that by physically miming the mapping trope used for

connecting the densely layered narrative in the series I could literally act-out or

perform the link-making rhetoric of the digital-bricoleur that I have been developing

over the project. Through a combination of non-chronological re-watching,

Googling, fan-site reading and wiki-chaining I was able to build a digital version of

the map. This activity re-enacted the trope of procedural police detective work

depicted in detail in this genre of program. The accumulation of nuggets of

information, and the construction of their connective links, enabled me to

forensically and physically re-enact the sheer volume and density of the narrative in a

new way. Translating this data from the digital plan to the material (analogue)

version, I realised I had developed a new wealth of knowledge and critical

understanding about the show. This realisation forced me to consider how I

fastidiously collect and archive all kinds of trivial information from different

perspectives. It opened up new questions about my previous readings of such

information and the performative process of gathering it.

In the case of this work I realised that because of this performative process, and the

affectually-driven close-reading that motivated it, I was carefully and critically

considering the show in new ways. I was drawn into making deliberate and

considered decisions about where a character might fit within the show’s depicted

systems and hierarchies, about the nature of relationships between different

characters, and even about how to map deceased characters. In this process, I formed

new readings about the show, reflecting more critically on how its narrative structure

provided a running commentary on the ideological complexities of public institutions

and public services. The way that it addressed the political and economic

implications of dealing with issues such as race, the war on drugs, terrorism,

corruption, poverty and urban decay gave me new insights into how I relate to these

themes in popular culture as well as in my lived experience.

The above insights will provide new ideas and work to be developed as the reflective

process of the practice continues and as new elements continue to emerge. At the

time, however, one of elements I was interested in testing was the intersubjective

!


potential that the work might produce – how the work could connect with other

devotees of the show (or not), and how that might provoke some dialogue about its

content and contexts. The work did indeed engender very different responses from

viewers who have seen the show and from those who had not. These ranged from

viewing the work as one giant story ‘spoiler’ (by displaying the narrative arcs,

arrests, and deaths of major characters), to reading it as a reference to the generic

cinematic figure of the detective, to seeing it as an abstracted kind of process-work

map. Part of the aim for the work was to play with these different possible readings,

invoking the intersubjective tensions that I discussed earlier and creating a kind of

shared transitional object of fandom. I wanted the work to reflect the kind of fervent

proselytising that fans of the show usually engage in, but, beyond this, to prompt

other dialogues between viewers – questions about why this work was constructed,

how it might operate, or even (like the show) what it might say about the systemic

corruption of legal systems and the ‘police order’.

As a separate trajectory of the process of making the work it also produced yet more

unexpected formal outcomes and possibilities. The process of making links, and re-

editing and re-sampling the narrative – then physically performing my relationship to

pop culture through the material processes of installing the work – has made me

more sensitive to how bricolage can operate as an activity across physical and digital

sites. The arrangement of index cards, photographs and differently colour threads

not only functioned as signs of narrative connection, but also created a quite

seductive composition through the formal arrangements of colour, shape and pattern.

The imaginative possibilities for these elements are still emerging, but again, as with

all the creative outcomes, this potential underlines the importance of the digital-

bricoleur as a methodology.

In this chapter, I have elaborated on how a selected range of the creative outcomes

were made, in order to demonstrate how the practice-led research developed over the

project actually creates new knowledge. In particular, I have detailed how these

artworks initially emerged from various states of affective engagement with popular

culture, and how this was combined with a creative and critical intent to unpack such

engagements. I have outlined how the practice makes space for such conflicting and

!


opposing aims, and the activities and attitudes they foster, to exist as

‘incompossible’. By effectively embracing the paradoxes that make up the territory

of the practice – by recognising that it is the ‘divergent but coexistant’ relationships

that provoke new contributions to knowledge – I aim to open up the practice to a

range of previously ignored approaches to making art. Rather than maintaining older

binary conceptions of fan/artist, and complicity/criticality, the practice-led research

embraces such ‘incompossibilities’ to generate new knowledge and understandings

of a more nuanced and subtle order than would otherwise be the case. Subsequently,

in the installation and display of the resulting creative outcomes, I invite viewers to

consider the simultaneity of their engagements with popular culture as well.

!

Chapter!5:!Conclusion! 97!

Chapter 5: Conclusion

This project has been focused on examining the connections between contemporary

visual art practices and fandom in order to explore the critical and creative potential

that might develop from this relationship. Through constructing a practice-led

research methodology, creative outcomes have been produced that specifically

address the question of what it means to be an artist/fan. Through a close

investigation of this question, the research undertaken has created new possibilities

for understanding the complex and dynamic relationships formed between visual art

practices and fandom. The construction of this methodology, the artworks it has

enabled and the revised understandings of how fan behaviours can contribute to

creative practices, together form the original contribution to knowledge that the

project makes.

The project’s central concern was in examining and testing the hypothesis of a binary

relationship between the activities of an artist and the activities of a fan. The

questioning of this opposition – which explored how notions of subjectivity and

objectivity, and complicity and criticality can be understood – was essential to the

development of this research. The research has addressed this question in creative,

conceptual, contextual and material form. It has employed the processes and

practices of art-making to reframe and rethink how my obsessions with both popular

culture and visual art come together to form a creative practice. This research

discovered that there was a related and reflexive relationship between the ideas and

activities of art and fandom. These findings were essentially informed by closely

studying the creative practices of other contemporary artists who work at the

intersections of art and popular culture. They were further contextualised by Matt

Hills’ ideas of fans as actively creative consumers, and Joanna Drucker’s

observations on how many contemporary artists also actively engage with popular

culture to creatively critique it. Recognising that these were in many ways analogous

ideas from very different theoretical disciplines liberated my practice in crucial ways.

These ideas reflected themselves in both the other art that I am fascinated by and in

my own experiences of fandom. They highlighted important conceptual and

!

98! Chapter!5:!Conclusion!

contextual links between the practical and theoretical aspects of my research.

Linking this research together caused me to conceptually and formally reconsider my

previously held ideas about the critical dimensions of art practices and the creative

possibilities of fandom.

Reassessing these connections between art and fandom opened up new ways to

reflect on how my practice as an artist could both respond to and employ the

affectual experiences I have as a fan in a creative and critical manner. This was

fundamental in establishing a new critical and conceptual terrain for me to explore –

and provoking new formal and material developments in art-making. This process

provided a site for ongoing reflective analysis about how the practice can be

informed by more critically considered experiences of other art, as well as the

obsessive nature of fandom. It enunciated new understandings of the creative and

critical possibilities for the practice, as well as contextualising the subjective and

speculative activities that result in the original creative outcomes. The other key

development that came from this discovery was how this connective process can

contribute to new knowledge through the formation of the digital-bricoleur as a

methodology for practice-led research.

The approach to creative practice that the digital-bricoleur advocates is what defines

the projects aims and ambitions. It is a methodology for art-making that is playful,

poetic, fluid, speculative, idiosyncratic and digitally driven. Importantly, it also links

these open-ended creative practices to more rigorous critical engagements with other

visual art and culture. It embraces a method of practice that allows for

simultaneously performing complicit and critical engagements with popular culture

in order to make sense of how subjective experiences of it can be reconsidered. The

digital-bricoleur has become the site of practice that enables the often-paradoxical

relationships that I wrestle with as an artist and fan to simultaneously remain

‘divergent’ yet ‘coexistant’ – both complicit and critical without “negating or

remaining impossible for each other” (Murray 2008, 248). It has become a model of

creative practice that advocates folding experiences of art and screen-based popular

culture across one another in order to develop new understandings of both. In this

regard, it has reconfigured my practice through understanding it as an active site for

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Chapter!5:!Conclusion! 99!

navigating, collecting, linking, editing, recontextualising and critiquing these

relationships. As a digital-bricoleur, I have created new connections, pathways,

images and experiences that have the potential to modify and reconfigure

engagements with these fields. As a research model, digital-bricolage also becomes a

distinctive way to examine notions of subjective and intersubjective experiences of

art and pop culture by closely examining our affective responses to those things.

This approach to research came about through grafting a range of pluralistic creative

and critical frameworks across one another, so the artists cited in the research have

been central to establishing the field of investigation. As well, this research has been

augmented through examining Claude Levi-Strauss and Michel de Certeau’s

concepts of the bricoleur, expanding on this via Nicolas Bourriaud’s discussion of

postproduction techniques, and considering these through the lens of Jacques

Rancière’s reframing of politics and aesthetics. As an aggregation of poetic, socio-

political and aesthetic possibilities, this digital methodology has built on these ideas

to develop a model of research that emphasises the primacy of the internet-based

experiences that I explore and enact as an artist and a fan. As an artist, it is the

inhabitation of this site and the experiences it provokes that has been essential in

articulating the outcomes of this research – addressing and exploring the creative

potential of developing art works through obsessive fan behaviours. Digital-

bricolage has taken these ideas and possibilities as starting points to examine how

the spaces and practices of my art-making and fandom could be folded back across

one another.

I started this doctorate with the intention of better understanding, articulating and,

perhaps, resolving the tensions that I believed existed between the two opposing

spheres I inhabited. Over this journey, I discovered that by using the content accrued

from my obsession with popular culture as the basis for making work, I have been

able to reconsider how fan behaviour can inform art practices. I have better

understood how the examination of the complexities of this relationship can be

expressed through creative practice. The research undertaken in the project has

demonstrated that the activities associated with fandom can instigate rich creative

and critical possibilities for artists. It has also shown how this gives rise to the idea of

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100! Chapter!5:!Conclusion!

the connoisseur-fan that I discussed in the introductory chapter – one who is both an

authority on contemporary art practices and a devotee of popular culture. This

aggregation of subjective, cultural, material and social spaces was grafted onto the

methodology of digital-bricolage and became yet another way for me to generate

new approaches to practice-led research. This reflexive and dialectical strategy is one

that, I have argued, has developed out of the practices of other artists as they address

the relationship between art and entertainment. Artists like Douglas Gordon, Candice

Brietz, Pierre Huyghe, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, and Paul Pfieffer, have been

central to contextualising and extending the original outcomes of this research

project. Through closely examining their approaches to media, technical methods

and conceptual concerns, this project has established a distinctive voice amongst

their work.

Through conflating the positions of artist and fan, and realigning the understandings

of complicity and criticality in art and popular culture, the creative outcomes and

critical reflection presented here have made redundant the need to see art and popular

culture as opposites. These outcomes represent a new spectrum of creative

possibilities for using pop culture to make and exhibit artworks. They demonstrate

that by recognising the specialised aficionado of pop culture as a connoisseur-fan,

this can enable a more nuanced engagement with popular culture. The creative works

that form the majority of the research outcomes, and the reflective analysis contained

in this document, demonstrate how the methodology of the digital-bricoleur works

across this spectrum of possibilities. In addressing the original research concerns:

‘What does it mean to be a fan?’, ‘What does it mean to be an artist?’, and ‘What

does it mean to be both?’ the practice has discovered solutions that effectively

sidestep these questions – if only to raise more, different questions to pursue. It is

really only by avoiding such separations and privileging of terms that new

understandings and experiences of the relationship between art and popular culture

can be developed. By considering art and entertainment, and artistic practice and

fandom, as linked together in a complicated, complimentary and co-dependant

relationship, the research has produced a more distinctive understanding of the

critical and complicit nature of our engagements with popular culture, as artists, as

fans and as consumers.

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Reference!List! 101!

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Supplementary!Material! 131!

Supplementary Material

The ePrints version of this thesis includes the exegetical component only. A

supplementary DVD of selected works is included at the rear of the printed version

of the exegesis, or can be requested from the author. These, and other selected video

works can also be found at www.danielmckewen.com and

http://vimeo.com/danielmckewen.

The Art of Being a Fan: Complicity and Criticality in Contemporary Art and Fandom

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