| Popis: |
This research project centres on a representative mode in the visual arts marked by seemingly contradictory operations. Made through a particular use of decorative form, this mode combines the operations of aesthetic pleasure and a more challenging or destabilising affect. It co-implicates formal beauty and a critical content usually associated with so-called anti-aesthetic art practices. The written component analyses the occurrence of this contradictory logic of representation in the work of late Victorian artist Aubrey Beardsley, and contemporary African American artist Kara Walker. Here I argue that while existing criticism on Beardsley and Walker points to the co-existence of these seemingly contradictory operations, it consistently privileges one term (i.e. beautiful form or critical content) over the other. As such, this criticism has failed to properly account for the formal and conceptual strategies of these artists’ work. Examining relations between the decorative, the grotesque and the sexually explicit in the art of Walker and Beardsley, and utilising Kantian and psychoanalytic theories, I examine reasons for this failure and interpret the work of each artist in a way demonstrates the critical fecundity of their dismantling of given oppositions been formal beauty and sociopolitical criticism. The practice component of this PhD engages with this contradictory logic in the medium of painting. It is similarly geared towards an exploration of grotesque and sexually explicit dimensions articulated in and through decorative form. It does so through the appropriation and manipulation of graphic traditions: mainly the Japanese tradition of Ukiyo-e, and the work of Aubrey Beardsley. Like the written component, the practice component of the project seeks a means of accommodating a critical position within the aesthetic of beauty. |
