Towards a non-representational geography of artistic practice

Thesis

Geography’s engagement with art has a long and varied history which, consistent with broader disciplinary developments, has progressed beyond a focus on the representational content of art products to consideration of artistic practices and experiences. However, persistent tendencies to consider artist, artwork and artistic spatiality as distinct and essential render the ‘geography of art’ under-equipped to address the emergence through artistic practice of particular, contingent, mutable and excessive spatialities and subjectivities. With its emphases on practice, affect and experimentalism, I draw on geographical and psychological non-representational thinking – philosophically, methodologically and analytically – to generate an account of such emergent spatialities and subjectivities. I explore artistic, material and implicit means through which they emerge, from within artistic practice, on both an experimental and auto-ethnographic basis. Working alongside participating artists, I varied the spatial and material conditions of our respective practices to encourage participants to do, think about and articulate their artistic practices differently, and employed interview techniques intended to facilitate access to and articulation from implicit or pre-reflective understanding.

Four substantive papers consider different aspects of artistic practice in the context of different theoretical literatures. Through these papers, I argue that artistic practice is a form a mythological thinking without explicit mythic content, and identify paired reciprocal processes of interrogation through which spatialities and subjectivities emerge. I propose that the combination of experimentalism and particular material affects within artistic practice sustains a skills-challenge imbalance, which drives further experimentation and generates increasingly individualized practices. I also argue that artistic practice provides both access to and articulation from implicit understanding, allowing the conveyance of implicit meaning both on its own artistic terms and by facilitating explication into linguistic form.

I conclude that, collectively, these varied aspects of artistic practice constitute interpenetrative processes whereby the material and implicit function as one, and that by attending to these processes through the creative and analytical means introduced here, geography’s capacity for a non-representational understanding of artistic practice is greatly enhanced.

Authors: Banfield, J

• Publication date: 2014
• DOI: 10.5287/ora-j5yxp0x91
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: Oxford University, UK
• Language: English
• Keywords: artistic practice; non-representational; post-phenomenological; psychology; geography; spatiality; subjectivity
• Subjects: Visual art and representation; Geography; Psychology