Opacity Shift: Picturing the Cute, Zany and Interesting in Image-Based Art Practice

OPACITY SHIFT:

Picturing the Cute, Zany and Interesting in image-based art practice.

SKYE WAGNER A thesis in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts UNSW Art & Design February 2020

Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname/Family Name : Wagner Given Name/s : Skye Abbreviation for degree as give in the University calendar : MFA Faculty : Faculty of Art and Design School : School of Art and Design Thesis Title : Opacity Shift: Picturing the Cute, Zany and Interesting in image-based art practice.

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

This practice-based research project examines how photography, through its relationship to diverse social and technical apparatuses, can model and remodel constructions of visibility. Following W.J.T. Mitchell and related photography theory, this project develops and analyses a metapictorial inquiry that ‘pictures’ the complex interaction between aesthetics, visuality and contemporary discourse. Through this framework, the research project develops the terms ‘staging’ and ‘versioning’ to describe and image the ‘production of aesthetic experience’ and the ‘temporal movement in materials and forms’ that traverse art and social contexts.

These terms are developed in concert with an investigation of image-based artworks and films by Camille Henrot, Elad Lassry, and Jacques Tati, as well as my own photographic practice. Specifically, this project examines how artists enact metapictorial critiques that give visibility to the aesthetic categories of the ‘cute, zany and interesting’ (terms devised by Sianne Ngai to articulate the complexities of contemporary aesthetic experience within late capitalist societies). This project argues that the art practices discussed co-implicate these seemingly ‘trivial’ aesthetics with a reflexive critique to produce defamiliarising effects that resist habitual modes of perceptual engagement.

The artistic component of this project is particularly geared to destabilising the depictive legibility and normative codes seen in photographic representation. It does this through a studio methodology where I build then photograph three- dimensional assemblages constructed out of printed photographs and commodity goods. By appropriating and manipulating the visual language of digital software and fragmenting familiar photographic tropes, the final body of work ‘pictures’ the imbricated and often difficult-to-discern relations between technology, economics and aesthetic experience.

Declaration relating to disposition of project thesis/dissertation

I hereby grant to the University of New South Wales or its agents a non-exclusive licence to archive and to make available (including to members of the public) my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known. I acknowledge that I retain all intellectual property rights which subsist in my thesis or dissertation, such as copyright and patent rights, subject to applicable law. I also retain the right to use all or part of my thesis or dissertation in future works (such as articles or books).

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i ABSTRACT

Opacity Shift: Picturing the Cute, Zany and Interesting in image-based art practice.

The artistic component of this project is particularly geared to destabilising the depictive legibility and normative codes seen in photographic representation. It does this through a studio methodology where I build then photograph three-dimensional assemblages constructed out of printed photographs and commodity goods. By appropriating and manipulating the visual language of digital software and fragmenting familiar photographic tropes, the final body of work ‘pictures’ the imbricated and often difficult-to-discern relations between technology, economics and aesthetic experience.

This thesis was written on the land of the Bidjigal and Gadigal peoples of the Eora Nation. I pay my respects to the traditional custodians of the land and extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Sovereignty never ceded.

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ORIGINALITY STATEMENT

‘I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged.’

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‘I hereby grant the University of New South Wales or its agents a non-exclusive licence to archive and to make available (including to members of the public) my thesis or dissertation in whole or part in the University libraries in all forms of media, now or here after known. I acknowledge that I retain all intellectual property rights which subsist in my thesis or dissertation, such as copyright and patent rights, subject to applicable law. I also retain the right to use all or part of my thesis or dissertation in future works (such as articles or books).’

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v INCLUSION OF PUBLICATIONS STATEMENT

UNSW is supportive of candidates publishing their research results during their candidature as detailed in the UNSW Thesis Examination Procedure.

Publications can be used in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter if: • The candidate contributed greater than 50% of the content in the publication and is the “primary author”, ie. the candidate was responsible primarily for the planning, execution and preparation of the work for publication • The candidate has approval to include the publication in their thesis in lieu of a Chapter from their supervisor and Postgraduate Coordinator. • The publication is not subject to any obligations or contractual agreements with a third party that would constrain its inclusion in the thesis

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x This thesis contains no publications, either published or submitted for publication ☐ (if this box is checked, you may delete all the material on page 2)

Some of the work described in this thesis has been published and it has been ☐ documented in the relevant Chapters with acknowledgement (if this box is checked, you may delete all the material on page 2)

This thesis has publications (either published or submitted for publication) ☐ incorporated into it in lieu of a chapter and the details are presented below

CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION I declare that: • I have complied with the UNSW Thesis Examination Procedure • where I have used a publication in lieu of a Chapter, the listed publication(s) below meet(s) the requirements to be included in the thesis. Candidate’s Name Signature Date (dd/mm/yy)

vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisors’ Dr Grant Stevens and Debra Phillips whose tactical questioning and thoughtful observations have been integral to the development of this project. Thank you for challenging me, reigning me in when necessary and offering your guidance.

To my friend Alia Parker who has been my studio companion, collaborator and the person who I most wish to share a cup of tea. I aspire to model your discipline, persistence and kindness. I would also like to thank Charu Maithani for reading sections of my thesis; our discussions have animated and clarified my thinking. To Madeleine James, thank you for your astute precision in proofing my document and for being a primary support in my life. I would also like to thank Rebecca Shanahan and Izabela Pluta who are always encouraging and gave me the initial push to embark on this research.

I have learnt from and worked with many throughout this project; thank you to those who have supported in the production and exhibition of my work: José Da Silva, Karen Hall, Tim Silver, Julia Mendel, Samuel Hodge, Naomi Riddle, Vasili Vasileiadis, Bronwen Williams, Belem Lett, Genevieve Felix Reynolds and Anna May Kirk. I would also like to thank the team at the Resource Centre who have supplied me with the tools to make this project possible.

To everyone at UNSW Art and Design, I feel lucky to have had the opportunity to meet and work alongside so many talented people. To the supportive graduate cohort, my reading group friends and all the HDR staff – thank you.

Finally, to my family and friends for their patience and love. Particularly, to those who I have depended upon throughout this candidature. To my ever-practical and giving mother Judy and brother Damien, sister-in-law Mariana and my dear friends Kali, Jamie and Maddy. You are wonderful.

vii CONTENTS

Abstract ii Acknowledgements vii Table of Contents viii List of Figures ix

INTRODUCTION 2

CHAPTER ONE: STAGING 14

1.0 Introduction 16

1.1 Aesthetic Capitalism 17 1.2 Staging the Cute and the Zany 28 1.3 Pictures 36 1.4 A Metapictorial Inquiry 39 1.5 Camille Henrot and Elad Lassry 51

CHAPTER TWO: VERSIONING 63

2.0 Introduction 64 2.1 A Versioning Method 66 2.2 Versioning and the Interesting 71 2.3 Versioning in Practice 76

CONCLUSION 96

BIBLIOGRAPHY 101

APPENDIX: Documentation of final exhibition Opacity Shift. 109

viii LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. Skye Wagner, fake lashes, shin bone, marble touch, 2020, 1 pigment print on Ilford Fibre paper, 62 x 50 cm Figure 2. Skye Wagner, Blue Pen, 2018, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 5 33 x 24 cm Figure 3. Skye Wagner, Peach, 2018, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 8 117 x 88 cm Figure 4. Skye Wagner, cream stripes, breadsticks, 2020, pigment print 13 mounted on alupanel, 34 x 26 cm Figure 5. Skye Wagner, breadsticks, cream stripes, 2020, pigment print 13 mounted on alupanel, 34 x 26 cm

Figure 6. Skye Wagner, trolley load, 2020, pigment print mounted on 15 alupanel, 20 x 15 cm

Figure 7. Skye Wagner, pink soap, apple stitch, puppy eyes, 2020, pigment 24 print on Ilford Fibre paper, 85 x 64 cm

Figure 8. Skye Wagner, rhino glove, elbow joint, corn cakes, 2020, pigment 29 print on Ilford Fibre paper, 92 x 69 cm Figure 9. Skye Wagner, guinea pig, sticky notes, 2020, pigment print 31 mounted on alupanel, 41 x 31 cm Figure 10. Skye Wagner, golden chalice, egg yolk, seashells, 2020, pigment 34 print on Ilford Fibre paper, 80 x 59 cm Figure 11. Skye Wagner, beige trousers, bread slice, neck brace, 2020, 35 pigment print mounted on alupanel, 66 x 48 cm 38 Figure 12. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, #25, 1978, silver gelatin print,

73 x 101.5 cm Figure 13. Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, oil on canvas, 40

318 × 276 cm

Figure 14. Alia Parker and Skye Wagner, installation views of the exhibition 42

Working Title, AD Space UNSW, Sydney, 20–29 March, 2018

43 Figure 15. Alia Parker and Skye Wagner, installation views of the exhibition Working Title, AD Space UNSW, Sydney, 20–29 March 2018

Figure 16. Skye Wagner, blue check, wilted radishes, 2020, pigment print 45 mounted on alupanel, 20 x 15 cm

ix Figure 17. Image detail indicating the physical imitation of the software 47 technique of liquefying or transforming. Figure 18. Image detail indicating the physical imitation of the software 47 technique of transparency shifts.

Figure 19. Image detail indicating the physical imitation of the software 47 technique of digital cloning.

Figure 20. Skye Wagner, flamingo smile, bandaids, breadsticks, 2020, 48 pigment print mounted on alupanel, 49 x 40 cm

Figure 21. Skye Wagner, Onion Skin, 2018, pigment print mounted on 50 aluminium, 65 x 44 cm Figure 22. Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, installation view 2013, video 52

(colour, sound), 13 mins Figure 23. Stills from Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue, 2013, video 54

(colour, sound), 13 mins Figure 24. Elad Lassry, Man (Soccer Balls), 2012, c-print in painted frame, 58

36.5 x 28.9 cm

Figure 25. Elad Lassry, Chocolate Bars Eggs Milk, 2013, c-print in painted 58 frame, 36.5 x 28.9 cm

59 Figure 26. Elad Lassry, Sum of Limited Views, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, 10 Sept. 2010 – 2 Jan. 2011.

Figure 27. Elad Lassry, Untitled (Boot A), 2013, silver gelatin print, walnut 60 frame, 4-ply silk, 36.5 x 28.9 x 10.2 cm Figure 28. Elad Lassry, Untitled (Wicker), 2014, silver gelatin print, walnut 60

frame, 4-ply silk, 50.8 x 39.4 x 7.6 cm Figure 29. Elad Lassry, Figure 32, 2010, c-print in painted frame, 62

36.5 x 28.9 cm

Figure 30. Elad Lassry, Pillow, 2010, c-print in painted frame, 62 36.5 x 28.9 cm

68 Figure 31. Oliver Laric, stills from Versions, 2010, digital video, 9.06 mins Figure 32. Ed Ruscha, Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, book printed 73

1970, 18 x 14 cm

Figure 33. Sol LeWitt, Straight lines in four directions and all their possible 73 combinations, 1973, Etching, 26.7 x 26.7 cm

73 Figure 34. Eleanor Antin, detail of CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture, 1972, 148 silver gelatin prints in complete piece.

Figure 35. Bernd and Hilla Becher, Winding Towers, 1966-97, nine silver 73 gelatin prints Figure 36. Jacques Tati, Playtime, 1967, film, 2hr 35min. Film stills present 78 a simulated Paris, a parody of the unifying design of a global city.

Figure 37. Jacques Tati, Playtime, 1967, film, 2hr 35min. Film stills indicate 80 multi-plane and multi-action staging, where simultaneous action competes for a viewer’s attention. Figure 38. Jacques Tati, Playtime, 1967, film, 2hr 35min. Film stills illustrate 81 how glass screens and cubic stages serialise space creating a comparative typology.

Figure 39. Jacques Tati, Playtime, 1967, film, 2hr 35min. Film stills illustrate 83 glass as both representational apparatus and physical form. Figure 40. Jacques Tati, Playtime, 1967, film, 2hr 35min. Film still: the 85 yellow boxes indicate the placement of cardboard cut-outs.

Figure 41. Jacques Tati, Playtime, 1967, film, 2hr 35min. Production stills 85 indicate the photographic props and extras.

Figure 42. Jacques Tati, Playtime, 1967, film, 2hr 35min. Film stills indicate 86 the versioning of resemblance, a system Tati creates that make the visual information within the film relational and prone to transfiguration. Figure 43. Jacques Tati, Playtime, 1967, film, 2hr 35min. Film stills indicate 87 compressions of space, a technique Tati versions throughout the film.

Figure 44. Skye Wagner, red apples, sport shorts, 2020, pigment print 89 mounted on alupanel, 39.5 x 29 cm

Figure 45. Skye Wagner, cream zipper, red delicious, shuttlecock, 2020, 91 pigment print on Ilford Fibre paper, 60 x 45 cm

Figure 46. Installation views of the exhibition Not Set at Wellington St 92

Projects, Sydney, 25 July – 5 August 2018. Works from top left: Skye Wagner, Peach, 88 x 117cm; Green Apple, 88 x 117 cm; Orange Nail, 26 x

41 cm; Splash, 39 x 45 cm; Spill, 40 x 53 cm; pigment prints mounted on alupanel. Documentation images: Brett East.

Figure 47. Skye Wagner, black grid, dusty tape, 2020, pigment print 98 mounted on alupanel, 46 x 55 cm Figure 48. Skye Wagner, bucket spill, baseball, stone hand, 2020, pigment 103 print mounted on alupanel, 46 x 55 cm

Figure 49. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 110 installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries. Figure 50. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 111 installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries. Figure 51. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 111 installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries. Figure 52. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 112 installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner. Figure 53. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 112 installation view, left to right: breadsticks, cream stripes, 2020; cream stripes, breadsticks, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner. Figure 54. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 113 installation view, left to right: fake lashes, shin bone, marble touch, 2020; folded crackers, woven cane, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner. Figure 55. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 113 installation view, folded crackers, woven cane, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner. Figure 56. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 114 installation view, left to right: bucket spill, baseball, stone hand, 2020; beige trousers, bread slice, neck brace, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner. Figure 57. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 114 installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries. Figure 58. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 115 installation view, golden chalice, egg yolk, seashells, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries. Figure 59. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 115 installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries.

xii Figure 60. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 116 installation view, left to right: blue tarp, 2020; pink soap, apple stitch, puppy eyes, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries. Figure 61. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 116 installation view, sticky sand, matchstick, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner. Figure 62. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 117 installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner. Figure 63. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 117 installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner. Figure 64. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 118 installation view, rhino glove, elbow joint, corn cakes, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner. Figure 65. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 118 installation view, left to right: black grid, dusty tape, 2020; red apples, sport shorts, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner. Figure 66. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 119 installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries. Figure 67. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 119 installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries. Figure 68. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 120 installation view, left to right: chilli pairs, chrome pipe, stress ball, 2020; flamingo smile, bandaids, breadsticks, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner. Figure 69. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, 120 installation view, blue check, wilted radishes, 2020 UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

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Figure 1. Skye Wagner, fake lashes, shin bone, marble touch, 2020, pigment print on Ilford Fibre paper, 62 x 50 cm

INTRODUCTION

2 A photograph is always a partial view that exists within a moving assemblage of relations: technological structures, social codes, cultural conventions, ideologies. Its infinite reproducibility bonds it to consumer capitalism through its capacity for mass production and networked circulation. In recent history, digital tools and platforms have algorithmically accelerated these links. This practice-based research project emerged from a desire to engage with the complexity of image-making in a contemporary context. In particular, this project seeks to examine a paradox that informs my artistic practice: How does photography both represent and abstract visual realities? The photograph, with its single-point perspective, translates a three- dimensional world into a flat, still surface, a mechanical process that codifies the physical world. And yet, due to its apparent realism, photography is often considered (if not cognitively then emotionally) a neutral view of the world. This question has led me to develop an artistic methodology that manipulates the representational capacities of photography to critically engage with the constructed nature of image- making and in so doing model how visibilities can be altered and reconstructed. My practice is based in studio photography, where I create images from constructed assemblages of printed images, objects and armatures. My practice, therefore, uses photography in deceptive ways to reveal photography’s deceptive nature.

Alongside my artistic practice and the artworks and exhibitions developed throughout this practice-based research project, this thesis responds to the central question of how contemporary image-based artists can use metapictorial strategies to critically engage with the commodified and staged aesthetics of late capitalism. In response, this thesis identifies a range of artistic strategies within specific lens-based art practices that make the constructed nature of image-making a primary subject. Through visual analyses of artworks by Camille Henrot and Elad Lassry, as well as of the film Playtime (1967) by Jacques Tati, these strategies are unpacked and explicated. To support the articulation of these artistic strategies, this thesis also examines the theories of two key thinkers, W.J.T. Mitchell and Sianne Ngai, who in different ways provide frameworks through which to consider the meaning-making potential of such art practices.

3 Mitchell theorises the ‘metapicture’ as a type of critique that exists within a ‘picture’ to reflect on the nature of pictures.1 This offers a means to consider the possibilities and limits of images to act as a type of theorisation in and of themselves. Meanwhile, Ngai’s minor aesthetic categories of the ‘cute, zany and interesting’ offer an alternative framing of aesthetic discourse that seeks to account for the dominant economic forces present in late capitalism. Unlike the classically defined aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the sublime, where ideas of distance and disinterestedness are key, Ngai’s categories are deliberately muddied with desire, labour and information.2 These additional layers of complexity make these categories useful in recognising the entanglements that the mediated image has with artistic, economic and institutional contexts. Throughout this thesis, I argue that engaging with the potentials of a metapictorial inquiry and minor aesthetics allows artists to rework the materials, processes and aesthetics of consumer culture while simultaneously restructuring their appearance as a means of critique.

This thesis develops the terms ‘staging’ and ‘versioning’ to locate this argument in specific artistic methods, and to establish a dialogue between my artistic practice and the critical inquiry of this thesis. Staging and versioning are considered metapictorial methods that describe and image the ‘production of aesthetic experience’ and the ‘temporal movement in materials and forms’. Together, they are used to express interrelations between aesthetics, visuality and socio-political discourse. Furthermore, these terms offer ways to think about the relationship in contemporary image culture between stasis and flow, and between the individual image and systems of exchange. The interrelation between staging and versioning is also important as it allows for an oscillation between thinking about the mechanics and formal operations of a single image, while also acknowledging that photographs are always operating in moving exchange systems: visual, philosophical, economic, social, technical and institutional.

1 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 35-82. 2 Sianne Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015). The ‘minor’ in the description of these aesthetics signals to their neglected status within theory and the minor and ordinary affects associated with the experience on them. 4

Figure 2. Skye Wagner, Blue Pen, 2018, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 33 x 24 cm

5 It is important to acknowledge that there is a range of artists who have been particularly informative to my thinking throughout this project, although they are not necessarily foregrounded due to the scope of this thesis. The tactics of staging and versioning that I develop throughout this thesis can be seen in the art practices of Thomas Demand, Walead Beshty, Erin Shirreff, Candice Breitz, Christopher Williams and Harun Farocki. In different ways, and while not explicitly discussed in this thesis, these artists have offered me ways to think about the metapictorial as a critical form.3 These practices make overt the various ways that representation and observation are relational constructs relying on forms of abstraction, deferral and referentiality. Their artworks offer ways to challenge the epistemological assumptions that inform the reading of pictures.

Similarly, it is important to acknowledge that, while I discuss my practice throughout the thesis, it is not possible to describe all of the various iterations that have emerged through this practice-based research project. The methods that I am developing are modulating and iterative, and the exhibition outcomes are manifestations of different moments in time, rather than points of stasis and completion. Thus, the works exhibited and included in this thesis are just some of these moments; each one is significant as it has modified my working process and is an example of the generative system that I have established in my studio practice. My aim has been to create an alternate picturing that is processual and relational. My practice foregrounds a language of transformation, repetition and mutation that continually maintains the possibility for reconfiguration.

‘Staging’ takes on quite a literal meaning in relation to my artistic practice and methodology. In the lighting studio, I create stages upon which I mix and combine printed photographs and commodity goods into confounding compositions. My aim is to create a visual incongruity between the methods of image production and the

3 Additionally, there is a field of contemporary photographic art practice that playfully engages with post- digital image culture. This includes artist such as: Kate Steciw, Sara VanDerBeek, Matt Lipps, Jessica Eaton, Lucas Blalock, John Houck, Artie Vierkant, Sara Cynwar, Katja Novitskova and the DIS collective to name a few. A possible future line of inquiry would be to comparatively discuss my work within this field and with a boarder consideration of post-photographic theory. However, this thesis’s emphasis has been to better understand the historical and social precedents for metapictorial art processes and minor aesthetics registers using case studies of Henrot, Tati, Lassry and myself. 6 performance of digital mimicry. I often build large-scale physical constructions that deceptively model the appearance of digitally constructed images. My photographs are ‘straight’, but they appropriate post-production software techniques with real objects and printed images. This turns the printed photographs into performers, acting out a type of software language of duplication, transformation and fusion. This conceptual and material punning is used to complicate the depictive capacities of the photograph and is a means to challenge familiar or normative receptions of the image.

Versioning is also prominent in my artistic methodology as it describes the working system I have developed for this project. As a term, versioning articulates the way I use one representational mode (photography) to present another (digital software construction). Additionally, it speaks to the movement, iteration and circuitry of pictures that exist within my photographic constructions and more broadly within my source material archive. This working process mimics the digital image economy’s circulatory, multifarious and mutable nature. It is elastic and ever-growing as each photograph has the potential to enter back into the source material archive to be versioned in another photograph. Thus, I consider all the images I am producing as fragments from one growing image; not serialised units but rather dissections and extractions from a moving image flow.

The content of my source picture archive appropriates industrial images, including stock photography, product shots, food photography and artefact documentation. These are largely earnest working pictures of commodity, institutional and online culture that are coded to sell, display and illustrate. By versioning these everyday pictures, my aim is to disturb the dominant commercial, gendered and industrial ideologies produced (directly or tangentially) through these pictures. In constellation and excess, the individual pictures and fragments become undisciplined, forming alternative irrational relations that confuse perspectives, materials and pictorial codes. The aim here is to defamiliarise the vernacular content and depictive processes in ways that produce discordant affective and perceptual responses in viewers.

Figure 3. Skye Wagner, Peach, 2018, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 117 x 88 cm

8 Staging and versioning are artistic tools for critically engaging with the domain of ‘visibility’, a key political domain in a world where the logics of growth prevails despite widespread social uncertainty, precarious labour, and economic stratification.4 Here, deception is instrumentalised in social and technical apparatuses as the world is mediated primarily through the commodity form. In this context, perception and the capacities to see (individual agency, personal bias), to be seen (surveillance, sovereignty, political voice) and to see through (to understand tactics of deception, to have the right not to be represented) are subject to various manipulative forces. Hito Steyerl’s and Vilém Flusser’s writings have been influential in unpacking how ideology can become subsumed in visual systems and their instrumentalisation, as well as offering a politic of resistance (which I refer to in Chapter Two).5 Photography in its various historical and emerging manifestations has been complicit in visual and social disciplining. This can be seen across different types of photographic representation, such as the objectification of individuals in anthropological documentation, the commodification of desire in advertising, or even the ‘simple’ request to ‘smile’ for the camera. The diverse social, commercial and institutional uses of photography reveal it to be not just a medium but also an ideological and affective instrument that is constantly adapting to technological and social changes. This makes photography a fertile but a slippery subject to disrupt and to present within art practice.

This project, therefore, argues that art practices that adopt metapictorial techniques to stage and version today’s vernacular aesthetics can offer new visibilities of familiar forms as a means of critique. In so doing, these practices nod to the aesthetic hegemony of late capitalism, while interrupting (even if momentarily) the normative and disciplining modes of representation that distribute cultural meaning.

This argument is traced throughout this thesis, structured in two large chapters, each with component parts. In both chapters, theoretical and cultural contexts are intertwined to analyse a range of artistic practices including my own. The thesis

4 I use the key term ‘visibility’ liberally throughout this thesis to refer to the dimensions of the social, technical and aesthetic which makes things discernible. Visibility can simply imply a literal capacity to be able to see. My intention throughout this thesis has been to place that more broadly within an aesthetico- political context as well as to consider access and agency and to question what is visible and to whom. 5 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012); Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000). 9 structure is drawn from my approach to making photographs and indeed to my mode of thinking and making sense. Like my practice, this thesis maintains fragmentation, jumpy associations, reversals and connections between seemingly unrelated elements and across different spatial and temporal relations. Although this montage approach has been difficult to wrangle at times, I have sought to keep its non-linear and fragmented qualities to resonate the complexities that are important to the integrity of my work and the ambition of the argument developed through this research project. This multiplicity creates a dialogue between the respective fields of visual studies, social theory, contemporary aesthetic discourse and art history. Underpinning this approach is my belief that to understand how artists engage with the contemporary conditions of the mediated image and the staged aesthetics of commodity culture, a multifarious approach is required.

The first chapter, Staging, uses staging as a descriptive and analytical tool for discussing the aesthetic regimes that constitute much of everyday aesthetic experience within late capitalism. It then considers a range of image-based artistic strategies that engage with these aesthetic conditions as well as establishes an art historical context for this research. Staging is used as a means to parse out and describe different appearances and engagements that move between a range of cultural contexts: artistic, social, economic, political and commercial. The first section, Aesthetics, establishes a theoretical context for the term ‘aesthetic capitalism’ and describes the aesthetic characteristics which have arisen from this cultural construction. This section then considers the new aesthetic formulations of the cute and the zany as theorised by Ngai. It argues that there are political implications for noticing how masked forms (forms that are cute and zany) are constructed, performed and interrogated within these cultural conditions. This section ends with an explanation of how the cute and zany are staged in my own practice.

10 The next section of the first chapter, Pictures, looks at specific artistic strategies that engage with the increasingly complex nature of aesthetic capitalism. The central focus of this section is the ways that artists engage with a social formation in which economics, pictures and affects mutually inform and structure each other.6 I analyse, via Mitchell, how a metapictorial inquiry can destabilise the reading of images and therefore act as a mode of critique. I also use this conceptualisation of the metapictorial to unpack some of the specificities of staging within my practice. This chapter closes with analyses of the work of two artists, Camille Henrot and Elad Lassry. Their works are analysed through the conceptual and formal lens of staging to consider how the cute and zany are staged, thereby enacting a metapictorial inquiry in their artworks. This section aims to articulate how the artworks of these artists challenge the presentation of vernacular aesthetic forms and therefore disrupt their cultural normalisation.

The second chapter, Versioning, offers a different perspective on artistic engagements within aesthetic capitalism. The term versioning is initially established as a means to identify information flows, systems and networks that exist within aesthetic capitalism, and to discuss artists’ engagement with versioning as a creative and critical methodology. I contextualise this by considering post-digital contexts as well as Ngai’s minor aesthetic category of the ‘interesting’. The chapter then discusses Tati’s film Playtime (1967) as a specific case study that pictures how a cultural uniformity emerged with the post-war global spread of western capitalism. This is counterbalanced with a discussion of the subversive versioning system that Tati creates in his film, and how it enables a different form of spectatorship. The formal features and techniques in Playtime are analysed to elucidate similar strategies in my practice. This chapter, therefore, both describes and performs a method of versioning, by moving and iterating ideas between various temporal contexts and examples. This is done to cultivate new connections between different phenomena, media and social conditions, as well as to highlight the links between technologies and cultures of vision.

6 I use this term ‘affect’ at times throughout this thesis and recognise it has various interpretations and theorisations attached to the term. However, I align my usage in this thesis with Ngai who maintains affect’s connection to feeling. Her usage gives discursive legibility to subtle felt experiences and their relationality to the social, political and aesthetic conditions. Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories. 11 Although I have separated Staging and Versioning into different chapters I conceive them as mutually constitutive. I suggest this structure rather as a process that could be reformulated, where the examples shift between chapters and can be looked at from different angles. This relational approach aims to resist containment by gesturing to complexity. As in my photographs, the aim here is to picture the density of the overlapping tenets within the research to give a sense of a multi-directional assemblage that is ever-moving in perceptual and communicative exchange. Thus, it is also important to acknowledge that this is an incomplete picture, a growing picture, an iterative version. There is much more I would have liked to have expressed and the hope is that there is a latency within this fragmented picture that signals to some of the possibilities and potentialities of this research that can be taken up at a later time. I recognised alternative frameworks and counter-narratives, which at times have beckoned me; however, this is the current version.

Figure 4. Skye Wagner, cream stripes, breadsticks, 2020, Figure 5. Skye Wagner, breadsticks, cream stripes, 2020, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 34 x 26 cm pigment print mounted on alupanel, 34 x 26 cm

CHAPTER 1: STAGING

Figure 6. Skye Wagner, trolley load, 2020, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 20 x 15cm

15 INTRODUCTION

This chapter is structured in two parts, Aesthetic Capitalism and Pictures, which can be considered two acts in a dialogue about contemporary aesthetic experience and artistic strategies that critically engage with them. In this chapter, I will establish how staging is integral to the forms and appearances of the contemporary social sphere and how specific artists, including myself, engage with it as an artistic methodology.

Firstly, this chapter will look at how staging is an active strategy within the development of late capitalism. It will consider how staging involves a merging of cultural and economic forms that have developed in tandem with new conditions of the contemporary including mediation, globalism and consumer culture. This context signals a change in aesthetic experience. It is no longer the domain solely of art; instead, it is integral to broader visual culture, the experience economy, politics and new forms of leisure and work. This contemporary configuration has been defined as aesthetic capitalism.

Following this discussion, this chapter describes the political imperative to consider how the aesthetic functions in and between these spheres. I argue aesthetic experience plays an important role in shaping social and power relations. Through unpacking the marginal aesthetic categories of the cute and the zany, specific characteristics of everyday production and consumption can be indexed. This reveals how these symptoms and appearances (the cute and the zany) collectively present a larger socio-aesthetic condition in which economic and ideological processes become camouflaged in form and reception. Because these aesthetic codes are prevalent in contemporary culture, new theoretical frameworks are needed to identify and understand their impact.

The second section in this chapter, Pictures, situates artistic pictorial staging in recent art historical contexts. In this section, I argue that staging can be considered a metapictorial strategy that enables pictures to self-disclose their own act of staging and picturing, and that this allows for new perceptual understandings of pictures.

16 Lastly in this chapter, I consider how metapictorial staging is used in the practices of Elad Lassry, Camile Henrot and myself in ways that illuminate and reframe the cute and zany. Staging, therefore, is used as both a descriptor and as a means of critique. It is a way of emphasising the current condition of aesthetic experience under late capitalism and also, as a methodology for artistic inquiry that has the potential to shift, shape and dramatise ways of seeing.

1.1 AESTHETIC CAPITALISM

It is important to define the term ‘aesthetic capitalism’, as this term helps frame my research and provides a rationale as to why a broader range of aesthetic configurations is needed. As a term, aesthetic capitalism can sit comfortably within a constellation of other descriptors that speak to a global socioeconomic condition.7 My specific interest is in considering how capitalism is intertwined with aesthetic systems. Hal Foster, Fredric Jameson, Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello and Gernot Böhme have been informative in unpacking the relationship between aesthetics and capitalism as I will illustrate below.8 In various ways, these theorists articulate the entanglement of aesthetics, economics and ideology that has come to shape the look, feel and distribution of power within late capitalism, where aesthetic elements have entered traditionally non-aesthetic domains (politics, economics, information) and vice versa.

7 The past several decades has seen multiple approaches to articulate the shifts in the socioeconomic organisation seen within contemporary capitalism. Descriptors such as neoliberalism, post-Ford, post- industrialism, information society, liquid modernity and surveillance capitalism are among the variety of terms used to make sense of these changes. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK, Malden, MA: Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000); Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, First edition. ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 2019). 8 Hal Foster, Design and Crime: And Other Diatribes (London: Verso, 2002); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991); Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2005); Gernot Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism (Berlin: Mimesis International, 2017). 17 In his formulation of late capitalism, Jameson foregrounds the merging of economic and cultural structures, systems and products that ‘now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation’.9 Similarly, Foster develops the term ‘total design’ to describe the saturation of design across cultural spaces. He argues that commerce has engulfed and enabled the merging of the aesthetic and the utilitarian to the point where ‘everything from jeans to genes – seems to be regarded as so much design’.10 Additionally, Boltanski and Chiapello articulate how capitalism has absorbed and revitalised the late 1960s ‘artistic critique’ to form a type of ‘new capitalism spirit’ that they term ‘connexionist’. 11 In their view, a connexionist regime is characterised by a move away from the hierarchical Fordist labour structure to a networked project- based organisational model, a move which co-opts the ideological resistance towards capitalism as a means to sustain the system.12

Changes in capitalist production since the late 1960s have created an appearance of freedom (the worker seems to have autonomy and flexibility), but ultimately this appearance disguises a lack of security. More advanced examples of this shift can be seen in the organisational structure of the gig economy and the increasing casualisation of work. The emergence of platforms like Uber, Lyft and Deliveroo replace regular conditions of employment, such as a minimum wage, overtime and sick leave, with the seduction of flexibility. Elsewhere, recreation and play have entered corporate workspaces; for example, at Google, which is famous for its consciously designed ‘fun’ work atmosphere. Ping pong tables, open-plan spaces and innovation time stage an environment that fosters collaboration, play and provides a sense of autonomy as a means to create more productive work environments. These shifts blur distinctions between labour and leisure and valorise

9 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 5. 10 Foster, Design and Crime, 17. 11 Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. The artistic critique the authors emphasise was embodied by ideas of autonomy, creativity, authenticity and liberation, which were responses to the alienation caused by the commodification of labour. It originated in the artistic and intellectual circles (accompany with the invention of a bohemian lifestyle) in nineteenth-century Paris and later evolved through the Surrealist and Situationists movements. 12 Ibid., 10. As stated, ‘The spirit of capitalism is precisely the set of beliefs associated with the capitalist order that helps to justify this order and, by legitimating them, to sustain the forms of action and predisposition compatible with it.’ 18 personal creativity and subjectivity. They are examples of how the capitalist system revitalises itself through recuperating strategies that were once used to resist it.13

The staging of ‘experience’ has become an integral and structural element in aesthetic capitalism. Production, display and the creation of ‘atmospheres’ permeate not just entertainment or cultural industries but also politics, sport, commodities, social relations and the presentation of the self.14 An atmosphere can be considered as the constellation and interplay of elements (light, space, forms, subjects, materials, locations, etc) that in concert produce an emotional resonance that is perceived by an individual entering the atmosphere.15 This felt space radiates between phenomena and subjects and powerfully influences a person’s experiences and reactions. To form these atmospheres, ‘aesthetic work’ (urban planning, design, cosmetics, marketing, merchandising, architecture, etc.) is required.16 This is the workforce that gives the ‘appearance’ or ‘look’ of spaces, products, events, people, experiences. This construction of mood is akin to ‘the art of a stage set’, a means to produce an aesthetic experience by manipulating the material conditions of an environment.17 This intertwining of the aesthetic with aspects of everyday life increasingly underpins the contemporary sensorial environment.18 The social is now fundamentally an aesthetic concern.

To develop a critical resistance to this evolving condition, more interpretive tools are required. Sianne Ngai’s theorisation of minor aesthetic categories offers an approach to comprehend today’s complex aesthetic experience.19 The cute, the zany and the interesting are formulations that help to detangle the enmeshing of aesthetics with other spheres of life. They deliberately contrast with the conventional Western aesthetics categories of the beautiful and the sublime. In contrast to these canonical

13 Although I have not discussed here, I want to acknowledge that Western capitalism is also adept at co- opting cultural and narrative modes of marginalised groups, taking cultural signifiers and commodifying their forms. 14 Gernot Böhme. “The Art of the Stage Set as a Paradigm for an Aesthetics of Atmospheres.” Ambiances 315, (2013), 6, https://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/315#quotationpg. 15 Ibid., 2. 16 Gernot Böhme, Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism (Berlin: Mimesis International, 2017), 20. 17 Böhme. “The Art of the Stage Set,” 1-9. 18 Böhme. Critique of Aesthetic Capitalism, 20. 19 Ngai. Our Aesthetic Categories. 19 terms, Ngai’s categories are more attuned to aesthetic experience within the ‘hypercommodified, information-saturated, and performance-driven conditions of late capitalism’.20 As will be discussed below, they describe everyday aesthetic regimes that camouflage power relations and economic processes. Likewise, they reveal the oscillation between pleasure and displeasure that is associated with much of contemporary aesthetic experience today.

The three-pronged Kantian theorisation of the aesthetic as an interaction of a ‘form or style’, a ‘subjective feeling-based experience’ and a ‘judgement-based speech act’21 is renewed in Ngai’s method with a feminist Marxist materialist critique. This allows for navigation between aesthetic reflection and economic critique. It is a way to be precise in the description of the feelings and judgements associated with aesthetic experience, while explicitly indicating the forces of consumer capitalism that shape and manipulate those experiences. Thus, Ngai offers a means to parse out the elements of aesthetic comprehension. This can be liberating as it creates visibility and perceptual awareness that can shift the understanding of and relationality to phenomenon. For instance, it can reveal how power relations are enacted in seemingly ‘trivial’ circumstances, such as how the act of calling someone or something ‘cute’ can be read as a micro-aggression that enacts a power of supremacy. This might be a small act, but it is one that sanctions an unequal distribution of power that mimics and produces the capitalist apparatus, an apparatus that turns all subjects and objects into vulnerable consumables. By reconsidering these everyday engagements, one can see how they produce both individual and collective subjectivities. What emerges through Ngai’s terms are new ways to see the embedded politics of the everyday; how personal assumptions and judgements in everyday interactions orient a subject to what they value and assert.

For Ngai, the cute, zany and interesting describe how commodification, information and labour are registered in aesthetic forms and how these affect everyday forms of aesthetic judgement.22 The judgement of something being cute, zany or interesting

20 Ngai. Our Aesthetic Categories, 1. 21 Ibid., 29-39. 22 Ibid., 1. 20 can oscillate between being positive or negative in a way that the traditional and more widely theorised aesthetic categories of the beautiful or sublime cannot.23 Through these terms, Ngai provides a language to express the clashing affects recognisable when in the presence of the cute, the zany or the interesting: ‘unfun and fun in the case of the zany; interest and boredom, in the case of the interesting; tenderness and aggression; in the case of the cute’.24 The clashing non-cathartic affects produced by minor aesthetic forms can, therefore, be seen as symptoms of aesthetic capitalism, where affective ambivalence provides a clue to the inherent distrust of the pervasive, deceptive and commodified aesthetic forms encountered daily.25 This highlights how aesthetic apprehension can be revelatory as it offers the potential to disrupt the illusion of appearances by identifying the agency exerted by the capitalist system.

These minor aesthetic categories are omnipresent yet ‘trivial’ in that they do not have the moral or theological connotations of the beautiful and the sublime.26 Instead, they index systems of ‘production, circulation, and consumption’ and reveal aspects of how contemporary subjects ‘work, exchange and consume’ in everyday practices. 27 The zany describes the affective labour required in post-Ford work environments; the interesting is about information exchange and circulation and the cute is about people’s fraught relationship with commodities.28 The resonance of Ngai’s aesthetic categories with my own felt experience allows me to recognise their expanded networks, how their contradictory yet ordinary operations signal to the manipulative mechanics of aesthetic capitalism.

23 Although the experience of the sublime is a combination of fear and awe, this tension resolves itself into a final release making it a profound experience. Ngai. Our Aesthetic Categories, 18-19. 24 Ibid., 19. 25 Ibid., 2. 26 Ibid., 18-22. The beautiful is often connected to moral values; for example, if you describe someone as a beautiful person, virtue is implied – and the awe experienced within the aesthetic of sublime implies a transcendence. This ‘extra-aesthetic power’ is not part of the experience of the cute, zany and interesting, which are rooted in ordinary and minor affects. It is this affective unexceptionality that often means the social significance of these aesthetics is under-considered. 27 Ibid., 1. 28 Ibid., 3-4. 21 These aesthetic categories also inform artistic practices and institutions, and in a later section of this chapter, I will consider how these aesthetic codes are staged with sly complicity in the work of Camille Henrot, Elad Lassry and myself. Next however, I would like to briefly describe the cute and the zany in more detail (and in Chapter Two, I will discuss the interesting more closely).

In contemporary image and commodity culture, cuteness is everywhere. There seems to be an endless stream of mediated cute animals and adorable things, as well as purchasable commodities that are squishy, fluffy, small and edible. These forms are unthreatening and familiar; often displaying a sense of vulnerability that elicits a desire for proximity.29 For Ngai, the cute brings together dissonant feelings to ‘lovingly molest’ but also to ‘aggressively protect’.30 This collision of care and aggression reveals complex subject-object power relations. Ngai contends that ‘cuteness is not just an aestheticization but an eroticization of powerlessness, evoking a tenderness for “small things” but also, sometimes, a desire to belittle or diminish them further.’31 Cute forms can act as anxiety suppressors, giving momentary distraction, an empathetic pull, and a sense of supremacy through consumption.

Cuteness has been linked to biological protective impulses. Studies of babies have suggested that adorable features, such as ‘large eyes, chubby cheeks, [a] small nose and mouth’, act as perceptual motivators to caretake.32 Ngai (via Marx) imbricates care into the development of commodities that increased during the nineteenth century.33 Marx argues that commodities request ‘guardians’. They cannot go to the market by themselves; they require caretakers to help them perform exchanges.34

29 Within robotic design there is an increasing instrumentalisation of cuteness, which requires ethical consideration. These designs are not simple forms but affective machines that mine emotional data. Cherie Lacey and Catherine Barbara Caudwell, “Cuteness as a ‘Dark Pattern’ in Home Robots,” 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (2019), 374-381. 30 Ibid., 4. 31 Ibid., 3. 32 A 2009 study used a schema of the physical features to evaluate caretaking impetus; it qualitatively recognised that the cuter features induced a stronger motivation to care. Melanie L Glocker, Daniel D. Langleben and Kosha Ruparel, “Baby Schema in Infant Faces Induces Cuteness Perception and Motivation for Caretaking in Adults,” Ethology 115, no. 3 (2009): 257-63. 33 Ngai., Our Aesthetic Categories, 61. 34 Karl Marx, Capital, vol.1, A critique of political economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Penguin, 1992), 178. 22 This personification of social relations between subject and object is intensified in a cute commodity. A cute commodity is corporeally available; it wants to be handled, touched, held close. This interplay of care and the consumable form captures the complex structural and affective nature of this aesthetic category. 35

35 Emotive feeling evoked by cuteness can induce a hierarchy of care. This is particularly relevant in research funding of animals. Morgan Trimble conducted a study that evaluated the data of scientific research papers which recognised a huge bias for ‘cuter and more interesting’ animals. Morgan J. Trimble and Rudi J. Van Aarde, “Species Inequality in Scientific Study Inequidad De Especies En El Estudio Científico,” Conservation Biology, 24, no. 3 (2010), 886-90. 23

Figure 7. Skye Wagner, pink soap, apple stitch, puppy eyes, 2020, pigment print on Ilford Fibre paper, 85 x 64 cm

24 Unlike the pull for closeness that the cute evokes, the zany creates an aversion or a desire for distance.36 Broadly, zany as a descriptor can be used to indicate an excess of energy, elasticity, hyperactivity, a formal ‘too much’ and a ‘trying too hard’. The Internet as both structure and experience embodies this with its pop-up windows, bouncy ads, image infinity pools, loopy gifs and inexhaustible information. There is anxiety within zaniness that has to do with the collision of work and play. According to Ngai, ‘zaniness is essentially the experience of an agent confronted by – and endangered by – too many things coming at her at once.’37 Ngai establishes the zany as an aesthetic category by theorising a type of comedic character that is working overly hard to make us laugh, including precarious situations with intense physicality.38 Modernist examples of this physicality can be seen in cinematic slapstick, where technological changes and new modes of production are presented as irrationally demanding, such as the inhuman speed of the production line in Modern Times (1936). However, Ngai goes further back to trace a link between the precarity of 16th-century ‘Zanni’ to the contemporary conditions of a post-Ford worker.

The historic Zanni is a stock character from commedia dell’arte who, as a financially desperate itinerant peasant, would make themselves mutable to various jobs but would often fall short of competence. Imitation was the performative strategy adopted to deal with the instability of their situation. More recent manifestations of this performative aesthetic given by Ngai include pop cultural characters such as Jim Carey in the Cable Guy (1996), Richard Pryor in The Toy (1982) and Lucille Ball in I Love Lucy (1951–57). Ngai discusses how these characters perform a style of ‘doing’ that requires the ‘production of affect and social relationships’, a type of performance that complicates the distinction between work and play.39 These characters have to deal with an unrelenting chain of activities across the public and private spheres and, therefore, often present a dual performance of labour: the labour that is the content of the narrative, and the labouring to make the audience laugh. This dual performance of labour indicates certain requirements needed in the

36 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 8. 37 Ibid., 183. 38 Ibid., 9-10. 39 Ibid., 7. 25 contemporary workspace and networking environments, where labour is not just the tasks you perform but also how you socialise and perform ‘self’.

Paul Myerscough has written about the behavioural requirements of employees at the fast-food store Pret a Manger concerning this type of dual performance.40 Staff are not only expected to complete their service but also perform a type of happiness, so-called ‘Pret Behaviours’ that include things such as ‘creates a sense of fun’, ‘has presence’, ‘is happy to be themself', and ‘doesn’t over-complicate ideas’.41 The company undertakes surveillance by hiring undercover customers to survey these personality requirements. Staff are rewarded and penalised according to how well they execute this performance of self. 42

The desperate behaviour and excessive physicality of the zany character creates an aversion and stops a viewer from empathising with the labour conditions the zany character has to experience.43 This is interesting in the Pret a Manger example because the saccharine performance aims to create an illusion of the contented employee by presenting a type of ‘have a nice day’ authenticity. This paradoxical exchange is essentially a staged performance that transforms not only the employee into a zany character but also transforms the customer into an audience member. This performance of sociability masks the real consumeristic exchange and the conditions of employment, allowing the audience to buy a cheap sandwich without a sense of complicity.

The zany thereby offers a way to consider the overwrought nature of productivity within late capitalism. The performance of efficiency is not limited to the spheres of work, but also in how well morning routines, self-care, body management and social networks are executed. These spaces of production signal to an increasing porosity between leisure and work, a requirement to be effective and busy all the time.

40 Paul Myerscough, “The Pret Buzz,” London Review of Books Vol. 35 No. 1, (3 January 2013). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n01/paul-myerscough/short-cuts. 41 Ibid. (A list of the Pret Behaviours, posted on the company website before the London Review of Books article appeared, has since been removed.) 42 Ibid. 43 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 11. 26 Likewise, as previously identified, the shifts toward a gig economy and new forms of precarious labour have increasingly integrated flexibility and play into the space of work. As the Pret a Manger example foregrounds, new affective demands (explicitly in this context) are placed on contemporary workers, requiring them to bring their abilities to be sociable and fun to the work environment. Collectively, these dynamics are embodied in the zany aesthetic. As Ngai suggests, the zany is really about a labour of performance, ‘a politically ambiguous intersection between cultural and occupational performance, acting and service, playing and laboring’, which has come to mark much of post-industrial work. 44

This production of a zany character is a subject that has been created through an assemblage of relations. Within this project, I am also interested in how the zany can be considered in relation to atmospheres and experiences, where, for example, you might have too many tabs open on the computer, or lose a sense of location in a shopping centre, or are confronted by a collision of pictorial signs (as in my work). I am interested in how these overloaded atmospheres have a zany contagiousness, destabilising the subject that is interacting with them. In the next section, I will be discussing the ways I attempt to mobilise this aesthetic register, as well as the cute, to produce affective discordance in a viewing subject.

44 Ngai. Our Aesthetic Categories, 182. 27 1.2 STAGING THE CUTE AND ZANY

Within my practice, I present perceptual paradoxes using familiar materials and forms as a way to create potential new readings and felt responses. The cute and zany register in my work as a way to signal to everyday appearances and operations in aesthetic capitalism, while utilising the conflicting affective resonances to challenge habitual engagements with the everyday forms and pictures. However, it is important to clarify that these aesthetic categories do not necessarily act as perfect descriptors of my practice. Instead, they are helpful frameworks (in concert with the interesting) in discussing the ideas, sensorial content and desired affective reception of my works.

The image content of my work often signals to spaces of labour (such as the office) or forms of labour (such as domestic or manual labour). My work also regularly includes images and references to the body as a way to visualise compressed relations between a social body and a physical body. The aim of this is to disrupt the clarity of a unified subject, entity or mediating body, and instead present fragmentation, dispersal and a shifting set of relations. An example of this way of working can be seen in rhino glove, elbow joint, corn cakes (2020) [Fig. 8]. In this image, the body is fractured, with only fragments or glimpses available to the viewer. The ‘whole’ body is never exposed. I also obscure the body with images and objects of diverse symbolic elements, including food, clothes, prosthetics and animals. The fragmented and relational features of the work present porosity between human/non-human, male/female, object/subject and exterior/interior bodily relations. Elements appear to be adapting and moving, performing a type of elasticity and mobility that is indicative of the zany aesthetic. Likewise, the work’s playful appearance cloaks a physical intensity where boundaries are being violated. For instance: a cardboard pipe impales a khaki t-shirt torso, a stapler bites a wrist, and a manicured hand pushes into a lion’s mouth. The zany ‘lighthearted’ facade hides a ‘vehement’ aesthetic, where danger and instability lurk.45 Within my work, I endeavour to present precariousness where elements are enmeshed, volatile and unstable.

45 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 7. 28

Figure 8. Skye Wagner, rhino glove, elbow joint, corn cakes, 2020, pigment print on Ilford Fibre paper, 92 x 69 cm

29 Zaniness also operates in the digital mimicry that my photographs perform. This semi- deceptive guise is an imitation that requires the properties of my materials to be pushed to their physical limits. The paper is balanced, skewered, bent – it tries hard to have the appearance of liquidity, to copy the mutable properties that can be produced easily in software programs. Yet this digital mimicry falls short of a seamless imitation. Ngai posits that there is something desperate and stressed in the labour of a zany performance, a ‘wanting too much and trying too hard’.46 In my work, I have enacted this exertion in the frenzied movement of the contents within the images, as seen in guinea pig, sticky notes (2020) [Fig. 9]. The paper forms here interact in undisciplined and acrobatic ways, both drawing attention to and concealing the limits of their materiality. This zany atmosphere uses repetition, imitation, movement and an overt physicality, which seek to model the contemporary conditions of a digital photographic image, its propensity for reproducibility, its industrial nature, its circulation and its mutable materiality.

46 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 189. 30

Figure 9. Skye Wagner, guinea pig, sticky notes, 2020, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 41 x 31 cm

31 Within my work, I evoke the cute through depictions of tactility and edibility. As Ngai notes, ‘the ultimate index of an object’s cuteness may be its edibility.’47 Familiar domestic items, animals and foodstuff are mixed together: bricks and pearls, fruit and pink gloves, animals and sponges such as seen in golden chalice, egg yolk, seashells (2020) [Fig. 10]. This sensorial dimension highlights transactions between the body and the world suggesting bodies and forms that are not self-enclosed but porous, shifting and mixing with the world. The cute is present here as a relational agent: ‘touch me, become me, consume me’. The visceral hunger of the cute is unlike the more disinterested agency of traditional aesthetic categories of the beautiful and the sublime. The conventional notion of the sublime in particular presents a positive relationship to autonomy. In contrast, the cute is unstable and beckons proximity, even cohabitation.48

In some ways, the proliferation of the cute in the contemporary sphere can be seen as a panacea to the lack of control one feels in response to information and commodity excess. As Ngai states, it is an ‘aesthetic of powerlessness’.49 The cute can offer a quick consumable hit of emotion, a moment of empathy that is not sustained but makes one hungry to have the feeling and sense of control again. Through my practice, I gesture to the ways in which the cute is staged in visual culture; one such viral trope I have exploited is photographs of tiny animals displayed on people’s hands (as well as other small objects displayed in hands) [Fig. 11]. This gesture can be understood as a way to stage intimacy and nurturing, a value to commodify, perform and circulate. However, the hand always presents an asymmetrical power relation between human and vulnerable animal; latent within this staging of material care is also the potential to crush.

47 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 79. Ngai emphasizes the role of food and the domestic sphere in describing the cute. She uses examples from avant-garde poetry including Gertrude Stein’s book Tender Buttons (1914) and Francis Ponge’s poems The Potato (1942) and The Orange (1942) to articulate how the diminutive status of simple objects and food makes them prone to being cute. These objects lack agency which makes them open to transformation, destruction and personification. 87-91. 48 A distinguishing feature of the sublime is the quality of something being ungraspable, an ‘unmasterable presence’ as defined by Jean-François Lyotard. Jean-Françios Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 68. 49 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 64. 32 This contradictory structure runs through all of Ngai’s minor aesthetic categories. To make the judgement that something is cute, zany or interesting leaves it unclear whether it has been regarded in a positive or negative light.50 It is this equivocal quality paired with ubiquity of these categories that compels me. By reordering everyday content through my work, the aim is to provoke visceral responses in viewers, challenging not only perceptual experience but also the felt or affective experience of the work. I aim to make photographs that prompt conflicting and paradoxical responses, such as attraction and repulsion, hunger and nausea.

50 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 19. 33

Figure 10. Skye Wagner, golden chalice, egg yolk, seashells, 2020, pigment print on Ilford Fibre paper, 80 x 59 cm

Figure 11. Skye Wagner, beige trousers, bread slice, neck brace, 2020, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 66 x 48 cm

35 1.3 PICTURES

In this section, I will further discuss specific artworks as a means to examine the potential of art to rethink complicated pictures. This section has two aims: firstly, to contextualise recent developments in photographic art practice within aesthetic capitalism, and secondly, to examine specific art practices that critically reflect on aspects of this contemporary condition. The Pictures Generation is a term used to describe a cluster of artists that emerged in the early 1970s; it provides a useful starting point for this section. The term ‘pictures’, as I will discuss below, is used to highlight a shift in visual culture that was occurring at that time, as well as indicate a self-aware handling of images that emerged in the practices of these artists. This was a type of staging of images that used strategies of re-photography, appropriation and collage to disclose and interrogate aspects of visual culture, representational politics and notions of authenticity. The Pictures Generation is important in the context of this thesis and my practice as it provides an art historical precedent for the various ways that staging can be considered a metapictorial act.

In terms of an art-historical marker, it is important to note that Douglas Crimp coined the term ‘pictures’ through the title of his curated show in 1977. He later wrote a journal article in October in 1979 in which he further developed the term as a way to describe the use of ‘recognisable images’ by the artists Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman.51 This category was further expanded to include art practices of Sarah Charlesworth, Barbara Bloom, Louise Lawler and John Baldessari, among others. These Pictures Generation artists acknowledged the significance of pictures in shaping culture. They dissected and staged moments from visual culture at a time when the entertainment industry, the aestheticisation of consumption and everyday life were increasingly merging.52

51 Douglas Crimp, ‘Pictures’. October 8 (1979): 75-88. The exhibition Pictures was held at Artists Space in New York, 24 September – 29 October 1977. 52 The Pictures Generation emerged in parallel to neoliberal economic practices of the 1970s and 1980s in the USA. Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar to gold, further abstracting money from a stable standard. Ronald Regan in the 1980s reformed the economy through deregulatory activities to trade. Similarly, moves occurred in the UK with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979. These shifting economic conditions and new cultural forms that were developing are among the changes which coincided with the rise in the theorising of the postmodern paradigm. 36 The Pictures Generation artists were particularly attuned to destabilising the dominant messaging of lens-based media by offering ‘allegorical’ pictures.53 Allegory here describes a sense of doubling, the use of one appearance or narrative to covertly communicate other meanings. As stated by Craig Owens, allegorical images

simultaneously proffer and defer a promise of meaning; they both solicit and frustrate our desire that the image be directly transparent to its signification. As a result, they appear strangely incomplete—fragments or runes that must be deciphered.54

Importantly, the Pictures Generation artists do this by making the ‘picture’ the subject. A good example of this masking can be seen in Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills (1977– 1980) series, where she constructs female cinematic personas that have a distinctively recognisable yet incomplete narrative presence [Fig. 12]. This ambiguous staging of the familiar opens up the possibilities of interpretation of the artwork, but also ways to reread the source forms.55

The term ‘pictures’ in this thesis is used deliberately to establish a critical connection between a visual context that is not exclusively photographic but includes a broader variety of media. This acknowledges that visual codes and ways of reading images migrate between media and that the technological basis for the production and reception of photographs, video and software images is increasingly imbricated today.56 In the following section, I describe how a metapictorial inquiry is a critical approach used by artists to defamiliarise habitual visual presentation and reception of pictures.

53 Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism,” October 12 (1980). 54 Ibid., 70. 55 Craig Owens, “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism Part 2,” October 13 (1980): 78-79. Owens discusses how Sherman paradoxically ‘denounces’ mass-mediated representations through complicit mimesis of such representations in her work. 56 The smartphone can be seen as a key example of the convergence of technologies and platforms, merging industrial, informational and economic systems with design, art and media culture. 37

Figure 12 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 12. Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Still, #25, 1978, silver gelatin print, 73 x 101.5 cm, image retrieved from https://www.moma.org/collection/works/56645

38 1.4 A METAPICTORIAL INQUIRY

W.J.T. Mitchell argues that ‘Metapictures are pictures that show themselves in order to know themselves: they stage the “self-knowledge” of pictures.’57 Metapictures are therefore pictures that not only critique pictures but ‘picture’ pictures. They do this in ways that can only be done visually, therefore extending and asserting theoretical thinking within the picture by drawing attention to the picture’s pictureness. Mitchell defines three categories of a metapicture. The first is a picture which ‘doubles’ its representation within itself, the second ‘recontextualises’ pictures of other types inside the picture, and the third is, in a broad sense, the discursive framing of pictures, how the discourse of a picture reflects on its ‘picturality’.58 Examples that Mitchell considers include Diego Velázquez’s painting Las Meninas (1656), the ultimate metapicture, which he states is a ‘labyrinth of pictorial self-reference, representing the interplay between the beholder, the producer, and the object or model of representation as a complex cycle of exchanges and substitutions’59 [Fig. 13]. This oscillation and interplay between acts of depiction and act of perception is the relational structure of a metapicture.

Metapictures always have a type of double meaning; they are always about the contents of the picture as well as the act of representation. In line with this, Rosalind Krauss describes the theoretical capacity of Sherman’s pictures by designating them a ‘metalanguage’, work that is not an object for art criticism, but in and of itself functions as criticism.60 The self-knowledge and self-critique evident in the metapicture provides a structure and form that I endeavour to enact. In so doing, my work shows different types of visibility that photography and software can produce and restrict.61 To begin, I would like to use the specificities of my practice to articulate how and why metapictorial strategies animate my research.

57 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 48. 58 Ibid., 35-82. 59 Ibid., 58. 60 Rosalind Krauss, “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral,” October 31 (1984): 68. 61 Metadata adds further complexity to pictures within digitally networked space, where the embedded data of an image adds an informational layer that can be mined and computationally seen. 39

Figure 13. Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, 1656, oil on canvas, 318 × 276 cm

40 Early in my research project, I staged a two-person exhibition with fellow postgraduate candidate Alia Parker: Working Title (2018) at AD Space UNSW [Figs.14–15]. The motivation for this exhibition was to bring our separate studio productions into the gallery in a self-aware way.62 Scaffolding was erected in the gallery to mirror the dimensions of the architectural space. It was veiled with a thin cotton fabric and lit internally. This structural device illuminated us and our prospective working spaces, creating an obstruction as well as a hyper-visibility; the viewers were able to circulate the space and observe us but not be seen by us. This apparatus was important for experimenting with a type of visibility that complicated the distinction between the theatrical and the real, as well as the relationality between seeing and being seen. When working in this reconstituted studio space, I became an image in motion, performing creative labour (at times, a zaniness). Throughout the exhibition, I worked inside this meta-structure, where I built a stage and constructed assemblages using photographs as my main material. This performance of representation created a type of mise en abyme, which confused the distinctions between spaces, images and acts; everything was simultaneously a mode of production as well as a mode of display.

Working Title, as the name suggests, had a tentative quality. The emphasis was on the processual uncertainty of making work and giving visibility to a developing working method. This process of making myself and my methods into a subject was not a comfortable process. I was quite nervous and self-conscious most of the time, and often wondered how this feeling of surveillance was informing the production of the work. Strangely, it made me identify with my working materials as I felt I was subjecting them to the level of scrutiny that I myself was feeling. Ultimately, this sense of instability became part of the form of the installation. Over the course of the ten days, we moved our works in development out of the structure so they could be viewed on the external gallery walls; these were not necessarily resolved works but iterations of a process. This processual way of working established a precedent for

62 Alia Parker’s speculative design practice involves collaborating with mushroom mycelium to produce experimental textiles forms and processes. Although our research is within different areas, we share an interest in shifting perceptual and affective understanding through exploratory modes of making. Hence, we worked together on two exhibitions in 2018 as part of our respective research projects. 41 my practice methodology, a means to engage contingency and move beyond the definitive sense of completion.

Figure 14. Alia Parker and Skye Wagner, installation views of the exhibition Working Title, AD Space UNSW, Sydney, 20–29 March 2018.

Figure 15. Alia Parker and Skye Wagner, installation views of the exhibition Working Title, AD Space UNSW, Sydney, 20–29 March 2018.

43 I consider all of my works to be ‘photographs’ and ‘photographs of photographs’. My approach is inherently self-referential as it simultaneously presents, in a way that Mitchell might describe it as, an ‘inside and outside’, the ‘first and second order representation’, container and content simultaneously held in a pictorial dialogue.63 In some photographs, I foreground the transparency of production, namely where the studio apparatus such as a light stand, metal grid or part of a reflector are visible. Other photographs have a more deceptive patina such as a masked appearance of a digital software construction. In both cases, the acts of framing and staging become strategies to disrupt the act of representation. These deliberate and self-aware strategies play between artistic illusion and the visual reality. Some images self- disclose and present distinct depictive spaces as seen in blue check, wilted radishes (2019) [Fig. 16]. In this image, the space of production and the illusionistic space (the ‘art’ space) are presented within the single image. Importantly, within that illusionistic space, a doubling is also occurring: the ‘real’ (the physical radish) is presented within the represented (the printed picture of radishes). The co-existence of these multiple planes of representation is a means to create a type of metapicture where the primary subject becomes the disclosing of the production of the image.

63 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, 42-45. Mitchell discusses this inside and outside structure as defining the whole concept of meta. He uses the concept ‘multistable’ and dialectical images to give a linguistic scaffolding to his explanation of metapictures. These terms refer to images in which different pictorial readings co-exist. The ambiguity of a multistable image is as much about the viewers’ perception as it is about the picture represented. He uses gestalt images such as the ‘Necker cube’ and the ‘Duck-Rabbit’ to present the potential complexity of an image as a site for understanding. In these optical illusions, the image changes (duck or rabbit) depending upon the perception of the elements within the image. This challenges the viewer to become an interpreter of what they are seeing, making the act of observation self-conscious. 44

Figure 16. Skye Wagner, blue check, wilted radishes, 2020, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 20 x 15 cm

45 Another metapictorial strategy enacted in my artistic process is the use of one representation method, photography, to speak to another, digital imaging. This strategy seeks to create relations and contradictions between the different depictive approaches (the photograph, the software) I am using. I have created studio methods that mimic digital postproduction techniques such as liquefying or transforming (processes which allow you to push, pull, warp and bloat the pixels of an image), digital cloning (the copying and pasting of digital information from one part of an image and placing it elsewhere) and transparency shifts (the process of layering visual information and changing the transparency of the layers so that different layers can be made translucent) [Figs.17–19]. I deliberately mimic and translate these digital manipulation tools by layering and manipulating paper and objects in my studio.

However, I complicate this mimicry by leaving imperfections of construction in the frame. For instance, in flamingo smile, bandaids, breadsticks (2020) [Fig. 20] the bottom left corner of the photograph features a paper curl of a printed photograph. The white of the underside of the paper is visible, as is a soft shadow that was produced by an obstruction of light; next to that, a breadstick is poking out of a cut incision. Likewise, I have scrunched up the paper of the printed blue shirt to give the appearance of crumpled fabric. These elements seek to subtly rupture the appearance of slick digital fusion, revealing elements of the physical materials. These dual materialities and translations aim to draw attention to the processes of looking. To produce images that sit in and between representational systems, prompting perceptual hesitations that lead to questions about systems and structures of representation and visibility.

Figure 17. Image detail indicating the physical imitation of the software technique of liquefying or transforming.

Figure 18. Image detail indicating the physical imitation of the software technique of transparency shifts.

Figure 19. Image detail indicating the physical imitation of the software technique of digital cloning.

Figure 20. Skye Wagner, flamingo smile, bandaids, breadsticks, 2020, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 49 x 40 cm

48 This meta way of working has challenged my own assumptive perception. In the process of constructing the assemblages that I photograph, a type of active looking is enacted; I move between the camera and staged assemblage to see how the camera translates form and depth, reproduction and verisimilitude. Active looking here is both a compositional process and an epistemological tool for considering the differences between human perception, camera vision and software imaging processes. Through this process, a photograph emerges. It is this dialogue between these different optical systems that situates these pictures as an ‘in-between’ space, contingent on connectedness and difference between modes of representation. Throughout my research, this participatory making/thinking process has generated productive disorientation within me, which has allowed me to experientially understand the partiality and abstraction of each of these depictive systems. I hope that this perceptual doubt is translated through the work so that the viewer can experience it too.

Figure 21. Skye Wagner, Onion Skin, 2018, pigment print mounted on aluminium, 65 x 44 cm

50 1.5 CAMILLE HENROT AND ELAD LASSRY

To bring these two staging sections together, I will conclude by discussing the work of two artists, using the lens of metapictures and the aesthetic categories of the cute and the zany. My argument is that through their methods of metapictorial staging, these works offer new ways to think about everyday aesthetic experience in the context of aesthetic capitalism. These works are pictures that interrogate their own representational qualities; they defamiliarise modes of receiving and consuming images. In so doing, they give visibility to hidden aspects of vernacular aesthetic experience. These examples provide support for my argument that art still has a capacity for agency in hypercomplex late capitalist contexts. Here, art can develop new models of seeing and imagining beyond dominant paradigms.

Camille Henrot’s and Elad Lassry’s works are also examples of artistic strategies that, rather than ignoring the vernacular and ordinary systems that form aesthetic capitalism, see value in getting close to them. Indeed, there is an ethical imperative in better understanding the dominant forms, systems and aesthetic experiences of aesthetic capitalism, as it is these forms that are imbricated and are complicit with the asymmetries of social power and the distribution of cultural understanding. Through proximity, deeper considerations of their complex operations can be formed and therefore, by extension, gaps, paradoxes and openings can be exploited. I acknowledge there is a danger of getting too close to the seemingly trivial forms of aesthetic capitalism (for example, pictures of cats and zany actions), as they risk being relegated to not being ‘serious’. However, I argue that practices like Henrot’s and Lassry’s converge minor aesthetic registers with metapictorial strategies to produce an affective dissonance in their reception. This reconfigures these familiar and often under-considered aesthetics and compels a revaluation of their significance.

In her work Grosse Fatigue (2013), Camille Henrot turns an Apple desktop screen into a performative stage for montage. This 13-minute colour video uses screen capture techniques and narrated spoken word to picture the creation of the universe. Created during a residency at the Smithsonian Institute, the content offers a new narrative,

51 assembled from diverse creation myths and layered visual material.64 The visual content assembles and fragments diverse materials from science to popular culture. It combines anthropological artefacts with film clips and books. Overlapping browser windows become containers for clips and photographs that manically move, seemingly without the presence of a human operator. This disembodied screen gesturing (god-like puppeteering) presents the construction of knowledge as a creative act, reflexively doubling the content of the montage which explores creation myths.

Figure 22 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 22. Installation view, Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, 2013, video (colour, sound), 13 mins in The Message: New Media Works at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, 2017, image retrieved from https://hirshhorn.si.edu/explore/press-images- message/

This desktop stage produces a metapicture of the ubiquitous contemporary imaging space of the digital screen. Henrot’s denial of human interaction presents the images as if the circulation and fragmentation are to be looked at rather than participated in. Multiple tabs, overlapping windows and hyperlinked content present forms of

64 The audio text was written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg, performed by artist Akwetey Orraca- Tetteh and accompanied with music composed by Joakim Bouaziz. 52 movement and multiplicity where information collapses, disperses and becomes partial. This technique levels the hierarchical distinction between internet gifs and scientific artefacts and changes the encounter with the familiar desktop interface. In this way, Henrot reveals how an assembled screen space and the internet can stage, structure, fragment and picture knowledge. By defamiliarising the desktop display, a structure which often becomes invisible due to functional use, Henrot creates a new awareness of its architecture and the modes of interaction it facilitates.

Apple’s design (the display Henrot uses) harnesses a type of ‘frictionless’ transmission: one looks through the first picture, the computer screen, straight to the content, rendering the framing invisible. This type of frictionless, ‘invisible’ design is archetypal in aesthetic capitalism and enables ease of interaction and consumption. 65 This type of invisibility can also be seen in photographic codes that stage content with a type of neutrality as a means to assert immediacy and claim objectivity (for example, commercial product shots, artefact documentation, crime scene photography). In both cases, this ‘seeing through’ hides the ideology of the designed, mediated and institutional frames. Henrot’s work makes visible these interfacing frames to highlight how they produce ways of seeing and usage.

Grosse Fatigue visually illustrates an aesthetic, informational and networked assemblage within which pictures operate. This is a complex system in which the component parts are not discrete, but hybrid. By staging the performance of image- based interaction, Henrot represents how exchange with systems (computer, internet, anthropology, pictures) is multi-directional. They inform, structure and contradict one another, constantly shifting the production, reception and distribution of pictures and aesthetics. Thus, the metapictorial structure of this artwork provides new ways to recognise these systems that produce, frame and assert knowledge.

65 This type of seamless human-computer interaction is championed in computer programming and web usability design. As seen in the titling of Steve Krug, Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability 2nd ed. (Berkeley, Calif.: New Riders Publishing, 2006). Apple and Google utilise this intuitive interfacing, which merges an ideology of efficiency and invisibility into product design. 53

Figure 23 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 23. Stills from Camille Henrot’s Grosse Fatigue, 2013, video (colour, sound), 13 mins, extracts from video accessible from https://vimeo.com/86174818

54 Grosse Fatigue has content that is ‘interesting’ and ‘cute’, but the ‘zany’ is its dominant aesthetic mode. The video presents a hysteria of information where images and videos are opened and closed, expanded and minimised at a velocity that is intense, physical and dissonant. Further complicated by the spoken word soundtrack, the artwork seems to be working too hard, precariously stretching and fragmenting across contexts and diverse visual material. Telescopic, microscopic, photographic images are compiled with movie clips, mediated books, video and screen capture [Fig. 23]. This abundance of action and information is both compelling and overwhelming; it is difficult to rationally and emotionally integrate the hyper- abundance, fragmentation and accumulating density of its content and display. This out-of-control and time-pressured ‘zaniness’ creates an affective ambivalence, a push and pull between play and desperation. Unlike the sublime, this zaniness does not resolve into a catharsis. Instead, the affect is more akin here to ungrounded anxiety. It presents the viewer with a type of frenetic labouring – a grosse fatigue.66

The computer desktop and the internet are complex spaces, designed and staged to aggregate work, entertainment, information and commerce. Henrot utilises this technological stage to visualise a type of frenzied productivity, a type of hyper- busyness that reinforces the social value and logic of forward growth and expansion in aesthetic capitalism. Grosse Fatigue alludes to recent transformations of labour (which I previously foregrounded) and the subsequent new subjectivities produced by such changes and cultural pressures. To be a productive subject (a virtuous subject), one must work and consume across the spaces of employment, leisure and self- optimisation. To multi-task, accelerate and become partial are the dominant modes of being. Through this excessive doing, this zaniness of activity, one becomes the perfectly pliable subject (a distracted subject) to an economic and political regime of productivity that supports unstainable growth, perpetuates inequality and fractures social connection.

‘Creative work’ is explicitly performed in Grosse Fatigue. A deep male voice in the spoken word soundtrack continually repeats the phrase ‘In the beginning’. The

66 The French title Grosse Fatigue translates to ‘great exhaustion’. 55 unseen hand, which is managing the pictures, makes the pictures partial and fragmented and move faster. The pictures here can be a stand-in for a freelancing worker, casualised, flexible and temporally unstable. There is a type of discontinuous, cognitive and affective demand placed on these pictures that models the precarious and productivity demands placed on contemporary workers. This highlights how social structural forms can be modelled and transferred in and between aesthetic forms, giving awareness of the web of imbrications that exist in aesthetic capitalism.

The visual tropes used in this montage signal the complex aesthetic codes of the internet, which mix information, commerce and entertainment. Henrot adopts different registers, including popular display codes that are often adopted by people online. For example, a type of haptic cuteness and body intimacy is visible in the style of YouTube videos where disembodied hands with voiceover are used to present and display products. This symbolic register in Grosse Fatigue is mixed with more anthropological visual codes, which assert rationality, order and ‘objective’ distance. The human hand plays the role of compressing and mixing these coded spaces: displaying, gesturing and demonstrating. The diverse clips oscillate between the stylised, with bright colour backdrops and painted nails, and the more utilitarian, in- situ display of dead specimens. In both cases, hands display and touch small objects and creatures: a marbled egg, a dead bird, a glass eye, a sculptural artefact, a small frog and AA batteries. This presentation infects the ‘rationality’ of the knowledge systems with intimacy and affect.

Elad Lassry’s work demonstrates how a literacy of images can be used to engage with various traditions, genres and formats of image-making from commercial studio to modernist still life, from film to the magazine spread. By re-photographing in the style of outdated commercial studio photography, as well as making sculptural effacements to appropriated images, Lassry creates a catalogue of zany pictures. Taken together as a body of work, his photographs reappraise and disrupt the coherence of vernacular image tropes and produce a perceptual precarity where the performance, materials and display are conspicuously off-kilter. Lassry describes this affective dimension as something that enables a pictorial self-awareness: ‘A nervous picture is one that makes your faculties fail, when your comfort about having visual

56 information, or about knowing the world, is somehow shaken. It’s the moment when an image tells you: “I’m also just a file,” or, “I’m just pixels.”67 I would extend this metapictorial reflection to also include ‘I am just a performance.’

Lassry’s images have an immediately seductive surface that is sanitised, crisp and luminous. However, his images are also perceptually unsteady. Lassry restages commercial and outdated image tropes in a way that reveals their often-overlooked characteristics. Once repositioned, these image codes become awkward, their performances as pictures stilted. This perceptual stammering is evident in Man (Soccer Balls), 2012 [Fig. 21] and Chocolate Bars Eggs Milk, 2013 [Fig. 22]. These images reveal the artifice of the pictorial codes and conventions produced through this commercial photographic apparatus. The emotional sanitisation, the frontality, shine and colour, and the shallow non-space in which subjects are placed, collectively create a sense of alienation. Lassry’s images subvert the advertising imperative, from which they draw their distinctive visual style; that is, to stage desire by making the viewer awkwardly aware that is what is supposed to be felt.

67 Mark Godfrey, “On Display,” Frieze, Issue 143 (2011). 57 Figure 24 and 25 have been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 24. Elad Lassry, Man (Soccer Balls), 2012, c-print Figure 25. Elad Lassry, Chocolate Bars Eggs Milk, in painted frame, 36.5 x 28.9 cm, image retrieved from 2013, c-print in painted frame, 36.5 x 28.9 cm, image http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/ecatalogue/lot.1 retrieved from https://kadist.org/work/chocolate- 46.html/2013/contemporary-art-n09010 bars-eggs-milk/

58 Lassry’s work does not have a zany velocity or speed in the way Henrot’s work does. Instead, the zaniness in his work emerges from his handling of the pictorial codes and a literal framing of his pictures. Lassry’s images are often assembled to form stock character catalogues within the gallery [Fig. 26]. This assemblage reveals the various pictorial codes produced by the commercial photographic apparatus. These working images have been disassociated from their functionality and as a result they perform a type of redundancy. Their outdatedness makes the codes recognisable and laboured to a viewer.

The second zany approach is his handling of the physical frame, which he often activates by painting or adding material. Untitled (Boot A), 2013 [Fig. 27] and Untitled (Wicker), 2014 [Fig. 28] are examples of this second approach. These works self- consciously teeter between being sculptural and pictorial, slightly embarrassed about making a claim as either. The function of the frame as a marker of division or self- disclosure between pictorial space and the physical space is eroded. This unbound zany quality moves through Lassry’s overture, highlighting the artifice of photographic and display codes, while making physical gestures that signal to a type of instability.

Figure 26 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 26. Elad Lassry, Sum of Limited Views, installation view, Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, 10 Sept. 2010 – 2 Jan. 2011, image retrieved from https://camstl.org/exhibitions/elad-lassry-sum-of-limited-views/

59 Figure 27 and 28 have been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 27. Elad Lassry, Untitled (Boot A), 2013, silver Figure 28. Elad Lassry, Untitled (Wicker), 2014, silver gelatin print, walnut frame, 4-ply silk, gelatin print, walnut frame, 4-ply silk, 36.5 x 28.9 x 10. 2 cm, image retrieved from 50.8 x 39.4 x 7.6 cm, image retrieved from http://www.dreamideamachine.com/en/?p=28534 https://www.303gallery.com/artists/eladlassry/selected-works?view=slider#28

60 Lassry’s work regularly gestures towards the cute in both content and form. His images often include studio portraits and still-lives of simple objects, foodstuffs and animals; cute dogs and cats peer out at the viewer. These intimate everyday subjects are cloistered in monochrome non-spaces that simultaneously displace and display. In Figure 32, 2010 [Fig. 29], a smooth, oozing anthropomorphic figurine sits in a teal colour field. In Pillow, 2010 [Fig. 30], a satin pillow made of several pink and cream blob-like parts, stands for a portrait, vacant and still. In these works and many others, Lassry repackages the cute through a highly controlled photographic language that destabilises the cute subject’s physical availability. He keeps his prints small, proportioned roughly to the dimension of a magazine page or two-page spread. This levels all of his subjects into the same intimate container – a staged page – both human and non-human, found and shot, old and new. This staging of ‘trivial’ subjects and ‘cute’ pictorial codes (the often marginalised still life, product shot, animal portrait) reveals how cuteness can make something consumable while also cheapen its cultural value. In so doing, Lassry disrupts prescribed ways of looking, not looking, and seeing through. He stages these codes in a way that gives them new visibility, value and importance.

As discussed above, the works of Lassry and Henrot are key examples of how contemporary image-based artists can restage the cute and zany using a self- reflexive metapictorial approach. Their works activate the affective registers of these minor aesthetic categories while simultaneously calling attention to the constructed nature of image-making. In my own practice, I also co-implicate these dual strategies to challenge assumptive perception and photographic inscription in the context of aesthetic capitalism. In the next chapter, I will extend this social and artistic investigation of pictures, seeing and aesthetics through the processual methodology of versioning.

61 Figure 29 and 30 have been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 29. Elad Lassry, Figure 32, 2010, c-print in Figure 30. Elad Lassry, Pillow, 2010, c-print in painted painted frame, 36.5 x 28.9 cm, image retrieved frame, 36.5 x 28.9 cm, image retrieved from from https://www.phillips.com/detail/elad- http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/72/EladLassry lassry/NY010618/178

CHAPTER 2: VERSIONING

63 2.0 INTRODUCTION

The previous chapter established a context for the term ‘staging’ to describe how artists are critically responding to the cultural conditions of aesthetic capitalism. This chapter offers another framework, ‘versioning’, through which to consider the porous relations between art and broader cultural contexts. By developing the term versioning, the emphasis is on a type of mobility, circuitry and exchange that can illuminate and make visible the social, economic, technological and cultural interrelations and flows that are fundamental to aesthetic capitalism. This chapter begins by discussing post-digital contexts and their propensity for versioning. It then goes on to examine Ngai’s third minor aesthetic category, the interesting, in relation to my artistic practice and the specific case study of Jacques Tati’s film Playtime (1967). While photography and pictures remain centrally important, this chapter also focuses on other systems of exchange – technological, economic, social, historical and institutional – to locate new sites and tools for critical artistic intervention. As I will discuss below, this is crucial for my artistic practice as it attempts to present this visual language of mobility by playing with the mechanics of photographic representation and enacting this methodology of versioning.

Versioning is a particularly pertinent artistic and critical methodology in a post-digital context. This term ‘post-digital’ defines a contemporary media and social environment that has been shaped through technological and computational processes and systems. These digital processes have evolved out of a coded system, where elemental digits are used to create and transmit information.68 The ‘post’ here does not express an after-state or rupture, but rather an ongoing process that is continually adapting and flourishing with social and technological change. Florian Cramer describes the post-digital as continuing ‘the state of affairs after the initial upheaval caused by the computerization and global digital networking of communication,

68 The roman alphabet can be seen as digital, where individual units can be combined and rearranged to create various informational forms. This way of organising information has been key to developing technology, but also to rationalising systems of exchange. 64 technical infrastructures, markets and geopolitics’.69 Thus the post-digital is a social context as well as a technological one. It is a means of organising, circulating and programming both information and capital that have been instrumentalised within aesthetic capitalism.

In Philosophy of Photography, Vilém Flusser discusses how programming is constitutive of all social and technical apparatuses. He identifies the computer and camera as two such apparatuses that produce ‘technical images’.70 He argues that while these apparatuses have been programmed by humans, the images they produce mislead spectators into thinking they are seeing an unbiased document of reality.71 For Flusser, technical images reorganise the physical world according to the code of the apparatus, imposing a structure onto that which it represents.72 To be liberated from this, he suggests this programming needs to be recognised and challenged. Flusser suggests that artists have the potential to do this by ‘playing against the camera’ and ‘consciously attempting to create unpredictable information, i.e. to release themselves from the camera, and to place within the image something that is not in its program’.73 The politic of resistance that informs Flusser’s Philosophy of Photography is one of possibility, and it is one that animates my research. Versioning is the term I develop to both signal to and subvert a type of social and technical programming. I use versioning as a metapictorial methodology, that gives visibility to the coded operations of social and technological apparatuses while reimaging it as a processual and open-ended working method. A generative system to form new relations and ways of seeing.

69 Florian Cramer, “What Is ‘Post-Digital’?”. in Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, ed by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015):15. 70 Vilém Flusser, Towards a Philosophy of Photography (London: Reaktion, 2000): 21-31. 71 Ibid., 14-5. 72 Ibid., 21-31. 73 Ibid., 80-81. 65 2.1 THE VERSIONING METHOD

Versioning as a practice-based research methodology adopts a language of iteration, fragmentation and mobility to reflect, critique and make visible the processes of networked communication and informational exchange. Thus, the versioning method is metapictorial as it elucidates these systems of exchanges and creates a space in which relations can be made anew. Versioning here aims to facilitate a temporal movement forwards and backwards between forms and contexts as a means to generate new connections. In this chapter, I move between and collapse different temporal contexts from the 1960s to the present, as well as interweave discussions of theory, practice and media. The aim of structuring this chapter in this way is to create a type of conductive moving picture that is assembling, imagining and modulating its component parts. It is a version that never fully forms into a static state of completeness or discreteness, but rather is an iteration and dialogue with a shifting flow of information.

Versioning relates specifically to the capacity for variation and mutability within signs, systems and materials. The Merriam-Webster dictionary describes ‘version’ as ‘a form or variant of a type or original’ and ‘a description from a particular point of view especially as contrasted with another account’. 74 These definitions are comparative in nature. They describe a type of continuity and difference manifested in form. The use of the word version is common when talking of adaptions, narrative accounts and translations. In the context of computational software, versioning is a process where updates are given different numbers to track and compare changes in the programming. This upgrading is also often connected to planned obsolescence, imbricating economics into the informational design. With digital images and files, versions can be made of the same image in different material forms (a print, a jpeg, a raw file, etc.). Likewise, digital files can be manipulated to create different versions of the one image. This last example can be seen as material versioning. Versioning implies creating something new while also gesturing backwards to a previous

74 Merriam-Webster Online, s.v. ‘Version’, accessed 2 May 2019, https://www.merriam- webster.com/dictionary/version. 66 iteration. A version is a temporal pause; it points to that which it once was, but latent within a version is the forward potential, a movement towards possible futures states.

In a contemporary art context, several practitioners directly engage with a type of signification versioning. It has developed as a way to work and think through appropriation, remixing and the circulation of images within visual culture. Oliver Laric, for instance, has produced essayist moving images works called Versions (2009, 2010, 2012). These manifesto-like video works are each a version of the same work that takes a historic look at the appropriation of images within broad visual culture from Greek antiquities to contemporary animations [Fig. 31]. Each video prompts the question: is there ever an original or are there only iterations of image forms that move through visual culture? Versions use split-screen to show different source content that are versions of each other, levelling any value distinction in the process. For example, photographs of basketball players stand parallel to anime cartoons of basketball players performing the same action. Elsewhere, the same scene from different animations run in sync and multiple photoshopped images appear of the same news photo. The proposition here is that creative production is the production of reuse; images are always in circulation, and their flow modifies signification systems and relations.

Figure 31 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 31. Oliver Laric, stills from Versions, 2010, digital video, 9.06 mins, video accessible from https://anthology.rhizome.org/versions

68 Photography lends itself to versioning. Not only does it seem to reproduce the visual environment and multiple prints (versions) can be made from a single source, but photography is also socially and technically produced through codes that can be reproduced, iterated and performed. The performative enacting of this can be seen in image networks where people produce infinite variations of the same thing (for example, sunsets, selfies, food images). This is also industrialised in picture economies that include stock, commercial and advertising photography. The artist and writer Walead Beshty extends this conceptualisation to position photography as a medium in motion that:

is constituted by a dialectic of applied use and technological development, and is further defined by the conventionalizaton of the relationship between the two, a process that occurs over time and is in a state of constant revision. It would follow that a medium is never freed from its use, nor is it freed from its position between some agents in a transaction, and it is always steeped in the inertia of its conventions, for this is how, by analogy, each new relation between shifting technologies and new applications is self-historicizing and legible75

In this way, Beshty emphasises photography as a dynamic relational system that requires a versioning methodology to approach its multifarious and evolving operations, technologies and distributive modes of address.76

75 Walead Beshty, “Conventions, Conditions, and Practices of Photography Conceived as a System of Relations,” foto_museum, 2012. https://www.fotomuseum.ch/en/explore/still-searching/articles/26919. 76 Photography as a medium in flux is seen in the impact that consumer technologies have had on the creation, consumption and distribution of photographs. For instance, the Kodak Brownie camera made photography accessible to millions of casual amateurs with no particular professional training and with that evolved a photographic snapshot language. Likewise, the iPhone 4 designed a forward-facing camera that enabled the rise of the selfie. 69 Similarly, Hito Steyerl presents digital material versioning in her essay In Defence of the Poor Image. She states:

The poor image is a copy in motion. Its quality is bad, its resolution substandard. As it accelerates, it deteriorates. It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, an errant idea, an itinerant image distributed for free, squeezed through slow digital connections, compressed, reproduced, ripped, remixed, as well as copied and pasted into other channels of distribution.77

Here, Steyerl argues for a positive agency in the mutability and accessibility of low- resolution digital formats. Poor images are images in states of flux, capable of becoming a different material version through movement and exchange; as ‘it accelerates, it deteriorates’.78 Steyerl describes that there is a hierarchy in digital files: ‘The poor image is a rag or a rip; an AVI or a JPEG, a lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances, ranked and valued according to its resolution.’79 Often the higher the resolution, the less accessible a file becomes and the more likely it is to be monetised. Steyerl also suggests a new way to value images that is based on the image’s capacity to circulate rather than based on its resolution or image quality. In doing so, she suggests there is political potential in a poor-quality digital file; its capacity for ‘velocity, intensity and spread’ enables an alternative image economy.80 In this way, poor images offer agency by giving access to information and by performing a dissonance against controlled image industries. Through this process of material versioning, a transference occurs, which sees consumers becoming producers and distributors.

77 Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2012), 32. 78 Ibid., 32. 79 Ibid., 32. 80 Ibid., 41. 70 2.2 VERSIONING AND THE INTERESTING

To extend understandings of versioning as an artistic methodology, it is helpful to examine Ngai’s theorisation of the aesthetic category of the interesting.81 The interesting is not as easily recognisable as an aesthetic category as the cute and zany and is challenging to apply in analysis. However, as I will indicate below, it is a productive aesthetic approach for considering the operations of informational systems and communication media, as well as being a tool for making critical judgements. This is because the interesting traces the movement and circulation of information and gives an affective and cognitive schema to evaluate encounters with difference.

For Ngai, to call something interesting is to open or suspend a conversation around a particular form; it is an invitation to question why or why not something is interesting.82 Although this is a ubiquitous speech act in everyday conversation, in cultural criticism it has seldom been considered as an aesthetic category. Ngai conceptualises the interesting as an aesthetic category and mode of judgement that is based in subjective feeling and experience. It is a discursive aesthetic category that prompts discussion, clarification and confirmation. Thus, it is also primarily concerned with circulation, comparisons of information and differences in form, movement and exchange.83 Although Ngai describes the interesting as ‘the “styleless” style of distributed media’,84 she associates its formal attributes with understated difference and novelty. Something becomes interesting when there is potential to integrate the novelty of the form into an already existing system of understanding. If the form is too familiar to that which already exists, it would move closer to being boring; or if too unusual, it moves toward being strange. Thus, the interesting flickers between these polarities.85 This ambivalence makes the interesting an open form of judgement that foregrounds the need for more justification to determine the unidentified qualities that

81 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories. 82 Ibid., 234. 83 Ibid., 1. 84 Ibid.,14. 85 Ibid., 5-22. 71 would deem the form interesting. It is this ‘conceptual indeterminacy’ of the interesting that links ‘subjective-based feelings’ with ‘concept-based justification’.86

The interesting is both a felt emotion and a cognitive experience; it enacts movement between pleasure and cognition.87 As Ngai suggests, the interesting ‘places us in an affective relationship to the fact that our not knowing something, encodes an analogous clash between knowledge and feeling’.88 This internal dissonance also presents the temporal experience of the interesting as anticipatory, continuous and incomplete, something to return to. This suspended form of aesthetic judgement contrasts with the instantaneous and more definite experience of the beautiful and the sublime.89 With the judgement of something being interesting, there is always the possibility for discussion and revision.

Ngai traces a genealogy from Friedrich Schlegel’s definition of ‘interessante’ as an aesthetic that combines difference and newness, to the serial informational style of 1960s and 1970s Conceptual Art90 [Figs. 32–35]. Ngai illustrates how information became imbricated in art forms through Conceptual Art examples that ‘replace the look of art historical styles with what Donald Kuspit called ‘the look of thought’.91 These examples often use a type of cool documentation that highlights process and typological relations. Here, Ngai uses Ed Ruscha’s artists’ book Various Small Fires and Milk (1964) as an ‘allegory’ of the interesting, noting that it examines the ‘modest flickers of affect activated by successive encounters with minor differences from an existing norm’.92 Ruscha’s book presents a sequence of photographs featuring ‘small fires’ (such as stovetops, lighters and cigarettes). The final image in the book shows a glass of milk, hence the deadpan joke signalled by the artwork’s title.

86Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 168. 87 Ibid., 129. 88 Ibid., 165. 89 Ibid., 134. 90 Ibid., 110-147. 91 Ibid.,144. Ngai references Donald Kuspit, “Sol LeWitt: The Look of Thought,” in Art in America 63 (1975): 42-49. 92 Ibid., 151. 72

Figure 32 and 33 have been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 32. Ed Ruscha, Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, Figure 33. Sol LeWitt, Straight lines in four directions and all book printed 1970, 18 x 14 cm, images retrieved from their possible combinations, plate #16, 1973, Etching, 26.7 https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/collection/works/428.2 x 26.7 cm, image retrieved from 008.a-s/ https://www.sollewittprints.org/artwork/lewitt-raisonne- 1973-05/

Figure 34 has been removed due to copyright restrictions. Figure 35 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 34. Eleanor Antin, detail of CARVING: A Traditional Sculpture, 1972, 148 silver gelatin prints in complete piece, image retrieved from https://www.henry- moore.org/whats-on/2016/09/28/eleanor-antin-carving- a-traditional-sculpture

Figure 35. Bernd and Hilla Becher, Winding Towers, 1966–97, nine silver gelatin prints, image retrieved from https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2010/07/29/rec ent-acquisition-bernd-and-hilla-bechers-winding-towers/

73 Here, I would like to connect the interesting with versioning. As described above, the interesting relies on circulation, comparison and difference. Versioning can be considered a ‘style’ of the interesting as it gives form to circuitry, such as that seen in Ruscha’s book. The interesting points to a type of flow of information within a network, how difference is registered and distributed. Importantly, it points to a subject’s reception of that information; how a subject becomes part of how the information is processed, evaluated, reframed and discussed. I have described versioning as a process through which materials, signifiers and media enter a system of iteration and exchange. As a creative system, versioning creates a language which mobilises a play between similarity and difference within a system of relations. Ngai’s articulation of the interesting as a minor aesthetic category is a way to apprehend the subtle perceptual and cognitive affects when encountering this difference.

The circuitry of the interesting has a meta quality, which according to Peter Osborne makes it key to forming critical judgements within contemporary art.93 For Osborne, the interesting has a double structure; it is both meta-critical and critical. Firstly, it is meta-critical because it places something in the sphere of that which is worth judging. In other words, it is a pre-judgement condition that states something is worth judging (sensory response – the flicker). Secondly, it is a critical judgement that requires justification of the grounds that makes an art object interesting (cognitive response).94 It is this second component of justification that needs to be redeemed in order to make a critical judgement of something being interesting, without this second movement the judgement is indeterminant. This discursive framework is a processual questioning: of why an artwork is interesting. It requires a consideration of the totality of the art and non-art relations, looking for ‘undetermined qualitative differences’ that make the artwork productive for thought.95 For Osborne, if you follow this movement

93 Peter Osborne, “Is it Interesting? Judgments of the moderns from Schlegel to Judd and beyond,” 1 Oct. 2015. Backdoor Broadcasting Company: Academic Podcasts, 60:10 mins, https://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2015/10/peter-osborne-is-it-interesting-judgments-of-the-moderns-from- schlegel-to-judd-and-beyond/. The interesting is also a helpful interpretative tool to consider the operations of art as research. A way to toggle between discourse, art forms and the subjective choices of the artist-researcher. It is a means to recognise the initial sensory ‘flicker’ of interest in response to some form of novelty, the calling out of one thing and then the process of questioning and determining if that can sustain interest. 94 This inside-outside structure is also the defining organisation of a metapicture. 95 Osborne, ‘Is it Interesting?’. 74 and provide evidence, a determinant judgement that something is critically interesting can be made.

Thus, the interesting as an aesthetic category is helpful to understand the various ways that art can critically connect with and illuminate non-art contexts (social, political, theoretical). It offers interpretive tools to better see and make visible the circuitry of information in an artwork and how the relational components are received and processed by a perceiving subject.96 Susan Best suggests that much contemporary art is geared towards information, as it often engages with critical issues (climate crisis, Indigenous history, migration, feminisms, etc.). She states:

Contemporary art now points beyond itself, draws in other disciplines and often requires extensive contextualisation to make an appropriate evaluation of it. In other words, it is vitally connected in a myriad of ways to information and what is deemed to be currently interesting.97

The art practices that I discuss in this thesis are critically interesting despite their seemingly trivial and vernacular appearances. The relational structure of the interesting, as Osborne and Ngai outline, has offered me a means to consider why this might be so. This thesis has been a way for me to work through this justification. It is a means to manoeuvre between, and unpack, the divergent art and non-art contexts that I have identified as operating within these artists’ practices as well as my own.

In the next section, I will present versioning as a relational and metapictorial artistic strategy that is evident in the film Playtime and my practice. Versioning, as I have already signalled, is a method of circuitry. It can be considered the system of relations within an artwork; how reference points, information and difference are registered by a viewing subject. This modulating process makes evident the relationality of perception and representation. In both Playtime and my practice, the versioning of

96 Ralph Rugoff titling of 2019 Venice Biennale, “May we live in interesting times”, potentially signals to this complexity. 97 Susan Best, “Conceptual Art and After: The Rise of the Interesting,” Art Monthly Australia, no. 311 (2018): 27. 75 visual systems, materials and media elucidate mechanics of image-making (formal, technical, material) and processes of perceptual cognition. Thus, versioning becomes a means to reframe and draw out aspects that may not be readily apparent.

2.3 VERSIONING IN PRACTICE

Jacques Tati’s film Playtime has been formative in the development of my recent practice and in developing the term versioning throughout this research project. Playtime is a helpful example to consider how versioning can be used as a formal strategy and a metapictorial tool. While not specifically an example from an artistic context, the versioning system seen in this film runs parallel to certain 1960s Conceptual Art practices, as well as to the discursive and affective qualities of the interesting in art. My reading of this film primarily uses visual analysis and thus does not engage directly with certain temporal aspects of the film (my analysis is referenced mostly through framed stills rather than moving images and does not discuss the important post-synched soundscape). However, I will argue that, although partial, this visual analysis allows me to draw out many important features and similarities with artworks and artistic processes relevant to this project. I have wanted to place this film into dialogue with my practice as a means to support my metapictorial inquiry; to use the film as a type of pictorial theory that has informed the representational and creative systems I have created in my practice. Through Playtime, Tati creates a visual system using versioning to reflexively illuminate aspects of image production and reception. This formal reflexivity and manipulation of visual information within the film has helped me clarify my strategies and has given me an experiential rationale for why I see formal systems as critically productive in contemporary art practice.

76 Playtime presents a post-war French consumer society that is homogenous, ultra- modern, architecturally disciplined and full of glass screens that produce images.98 In the same year this film was released (1967), Guy Debord also published Society of the Spectacle in which he critiques how society has become a mass spectacle and how the commodity has infiltrated every aspect of everyday life.99 According to Debord, ‘the spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.’100 Debord argues social experience, fuelled by economic change, initially degraded from being into having, but subsequently shifted into appearing.101 This radically altered social life into a system of appearances and spectacles.102 Playtime presents a model of this spectacle society. It is a society that fetishises the new, is shaped by consumer desires and is mediated by images. Throughout the film, modernised locations of post-industrial circulation and exchange, such as the airport, the office, the trade fair and the restaurant, are all prominent settings. The alienating world that Tati creates is indicative of the ‘totalising design’ of aesthetic capitalism (previously discussed in Chapter One). Here the modern global city, merchandising, business, travel and the commodity form have been unified with a look [Fig. 36].

From today’s vantage point, Playtime seems to picture a hyperabundant aesthetic capitalism in its infancy. In the previous chapter, I ‘staged’ how this subsuming apparatus produces and restricts ways of seeing and how the aesthetic and economic has become enmeshed in design, visual cultures and modes of social organisation. Playtime offers a visualisation of this cultural formation and presents the emergence of global social systems and networks that pre-empt a post-digital form. The film provides glimpses of how globalisation has become an iterative and scalable

98 Tati parodies the International Style of design promoted through Congrès internationaux d'architecture moderne (CIAM). This organisation of architects established by Le Corbusier promoted a type of rational design that emphasised minimalism and industrial production; the design program had a political and economic vision that argued ‘The most efficient method of production is that which arises from rationalization and standardization.’ See: CIAM’s La Sarraz Declaration in Ulrich Conrads, Programs and Manifestoes on 20th-Century Architecture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1970), 110. 99 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Paris: Editions Buchet-Chastel, 1967). Trans. by Ken Knabb, (London: Rebel Press, 2004). 100 Ibid., 7. 101 Ibid., 10-11. 102 Ibid., 10-11. 77 system that enables panoptic cultures (entertainment, architecture, surveillance), prioritises the commodity and provides new forms of circulation (capital, information, people) to be versioned across Western democracies and beyond. This context is relevant to both a contemporary context and this research as it is a surfacing point within the global corporate agenda of aesthetic capitalism.

Figure 36 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 36. Playtime stills present a simulated Paris, a parody of the unifying design of a global city. Film accessible from https://www.criterion.com/films/651 -playtime

The design of the city presents a new rational uniformity of steel and glass, which disciplines the flow of movement and mediating relations between people. Shot on a completely fabricated set on the outskirts of Paris, the basic activity of the two central characters is about looking and attempting to connect. Barbara is searching for glimpses of the ‘real’ Paris while being herded around with her tourist group. Meanwhile, Monsieur Hulot (Tati’s iconic character) is looking for Giffard, with whom he has a business meeting. The film is staged in two parts, the first at a trade fair and office complex, and the second, at a restaurant. Playtime works against the conventions of popular narrative cinema where immersion in the story propels the engagement. Instead, Playtime foregrounds a complex visual structure that uses versioning to create an alternative viewing experience. This production of a visual system and its new forms of engagement is what initially drew me to this film and why I am examining it here as a case study. The critique is not didactically present in the narrative but instead woven through the form and the way it structures and transfigures visual information. In other words, I read the film as a metapictorial critique. The film alters the way a viewer apprehends the content and the apparatuses (both technical and cultural) and draws attention to the production of those ways of seeing.

78 Tati enables this type of curious spectatorship through a reduced narrative and the formal use of layering, density and multiplicity. This highly stylised and yet almost plotless film is full of narratively irrelevant gags and visually complex shots. Facilitated by a wide 65mm film format that allows for deep clarity and information-rich images, Tati uses visual density, in particular multi-plane and multi-action staging, to offer new viewing challenges to his audience. This is unlike the more directed, centred action and narrative thrust of conventional Hollywood cinema, which uses conventions of close-ups, mid shots and reverse edit cuts to direct attention and propel the narrative. Here the simultaneous action in wide and long shots forces the viewer to choose where to look.103 Multiple comedic moments and general action vie for a viewer’s attention. As argued by critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, ‘the subject of a typical shot is everything that appears on the screen.’104 Consequently, all action in the shot becomes simultaneously important, the background and foreground are equalised [Fig. 37]. The viewer is given the observational agency to pick and choose what to look at, to circulate the contents of the screen and to discover things of interest. This activation of the spectator’s curiosity via the interesting occurs through the negation of any forced direction, making the act of observation self-conscious. Thus, the interesting is operating here as a tool to engage the viewer’s attention in subtle games of spot the difference. In this way, the film utilises metapictorial strategies that not only reflect on a type of culture of vision enacted through formal cinematic devices but also on how spectators are produced through such strategies.

Tati utilises the film camera’s apparent lack of discrimination to capture an excess of visual information. This density creates the perceptual impossibility of taking everything in, thus one viewing of the film is an incomplete viewing. As such, the film presents a different temporal logic: not in that the film is one of many, but rather that in the one film there are many versions. As film critic Noel Burch states, ‘Tati’s film is the first in the history of cinema that not only must be seen several different times, but

103 Multiple researchers have discussed Tati’s use of multi-plane and multi-action within a single shot, as a means of presenting various points of interest within the frame. Kristin Thompson, Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist film analysis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), 254; Noël Burch, Theory of Film Practice, Trans. by Helen R. Lane (London: Secker and Warburg, 1973), 37. 104 Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 38. 79 also viewed from several different distances from the screen.’105 This presentation of the visual information is closer to the experience of being in the world where there is a density of visual stimuli. Thus, it offers a meditation on how observation is a process of filtered information, which is governed by personal and cognitive bias.

Figure 37 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 37. Playtime stills indicate multi-plane and multi-action staging, where simultaneous action compete for a viewer’s attention. Film accessible from https://www.criterion.com/films/651-playtime

Tati versions spaces throughout the film. In his simulated city, the architectural motifs of the cube and glass carry the function of stage and screen. These forms and materials are repeated throughout the film, acting as markers that reveal a totalising homogeneity and order, as well as a means to build a visual patterning throughout the film. This sets up a typological structure within the film, a way to look for similarity and difference between the spaces. This is much like what is seen in the work of 1960s conceptual artists such as Ruscha, Eleanor Antin, Sol LeWitt and Hilla and Bernd Becher among others [Figs. 32–35], who were working at the same time as Tati’s film was made. Artists like these developed artistic systems that used programmatic seriality and rules to create comparative relationality between the component parts.

105 Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice, 43. 80 In Playtime, the cubic stage acts as a repetitive unit that exists across the different locations: office, trade fair and apartment block [Fig. 38]. The cube becomes a stage on which to perform efficiency at both work and leisure. One example is when a salesperson, who is displaying gadgets at a trade fair, is mimicked in a later scene when a homeowner walks around his apartment showing Hulot his domestic gadgets. In examples like this throughout the film, variation and continuity (key aspects of the interesting) are used to dismantle distinctions between business, commerce and leisure to create a programmatic uniformity.

Figure 38 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 38. Playtime stills illustrate how glass screens and cubic stages serialise space, creating a comparative typology. Film accessible from https://www.criterion.com/films/651-playtime

The recursive and reflexive use of glass as an optical apparatus in Playtime also has dual functions. Firstly, it presents a serial standardisation across a variety of locations, and secondly, it creates perceptual dissonance for the characters. As illustrated below, glass mediates relations between people and spaces [Fig. 39]. Tati uses glass as a means to stage images within the cinematic frame: its reflective capacities are seen when Barbara gets a glance of the Eiffel Tower through a glass door and its transparent properties are used in the apartment scene to create a panoptic social taxonomy. In other moments, perceptual dissonance is performed through personal interactions with glass. Such instances can be seen when Hulot thinks he spots

81 Giffard (the person he is meeting) in the glass building opposite him; however, Giffard is actually just to his left. Hulot is tricked by Giffard’s reflection. In other instances, the transparency of glass is not registered, which leads people to walk into it. This is the case when Giffard bumps his nose at the office complex and again when Hulot walks into a door at the restaurant, so forcefully as to shatter it. Furthermore, this is seen when the travel agent becomes a horned ram for a moment, which flaunts the physicality and transparency of glass for comedic effect. While these kinds of formal gags can be considered a form of the zany, the rhythm of their presentation is more restrained than the previous examples foregrounded. Rather, the visual patterning Tati produces strongly activates the interesting through a recalibration of similarity and difference.

This perceptual dialogue highlights the production of visibility as something slippery and informed by the infrastructures of urbanised modernity. Throughout the film, the glass acts as both a screen that allows images to appear and as an apparatus to ‘see-through’. In both cases, it foregrounds how framing, lenses and screens are instruments that influence what and how things are pictured. It also warns that proclamations of transparency are not always what they seem. Here, glass is used to create a metapictorial reflection on the construction of visibility.

Figure 39 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 39. Playtime stills illustrate glass as both representational apparatus and physical form. Film accessible from https://www.criterion.com/films/651 -playtime

83 Tati’s complex visual system uses versioning to build formal repetitions that make things look strange and prone to transfiguration. This generative system builds throughout the film both in the versioning of subject matter and stylistic form. To a large extent, this is what makes the film so visually ‘interesting’. For example, this can be seen in the way Tati choreographs the placement of photographic cardboard cut- outs. These black and white life-size figures populate many scenes, interspersed and interacting with live human bodies. The live actors often approximate the static and stiff statues of these photographic figures and at times throughout the film they change places. A figure can be a cut-out in one scene and a live figure in the next. The grey palette of the first part of the film allows for these cut-outs to be difficult to discern among the desaturated bureaucrats. This creates a visual equivalence that turns both the real and represented into abstractions [Fig. 40]. Similarly, false Hulots appear throughout Playtime dressed in his trademark raincoat, hat and pipe. This tactic momentarily attracts one’s attention to a particular part of the frame, only for it to be revealed that the figure is not Hulot. Likewise, Tati discretely plays other roles within the film; for example, a policeman directing traffic and a workman at the restaurant. These fake Hulots and Tatis play with appearance, create diversions that move away from centralised directed action towards multiple non-hierarchical actions that occur across the frame. Again, Tati activates the interesting here as a mode of aesthetic engagement by playing between ‘types’ and modes of variation. Techniques that make overt the act of observation and signal to the constructed nature of the picture.

Figure 40 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 40. Playtime still: the yellow boxes indicate the placement of cardboard cut-outs. Film accessible from https://www.criterion.com/films/651 -playtime

Figure 41 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 41. Playtime production stills indicate the photographic props and extras. Film accessible from https://www.criterion.com/films/651-playtime

85 The versioning of visual similarity complicates the modes of representation and offers a type of perceptual play to the viewer. For example, one scene in Playtime is set in a trade fair in which gimmicky consumer goods are the main attraction: brooms with headlights, garbage bins that are shaped as Greek columns, glasses that move up and down like wind wipers, and doors that shut with the sound of golden silence. The mimicry seen in consumer goods is something that Tati uses as a formal tactic within the film. They act as indicators; for instance, when we see cars in later scenes they start to look like the broom with headlights and when a man’s glasses break in a later scene, they mimic the glasses that were previously on sale. This visual versioning and counterfeiting create a strange relational temporality within the film. Each modification changes one’s memory of the previous iteration, while simultaneously evoking anticipation for future possibilities. Here the viewer becomes part of the versioning system, as each iteration mixes with their own imagining and perceptual compulsions [Fig. 42]. This relational and perceptual ongoingness is the distinct temporal characteristic of the interesting.

Figure 42 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 42. Playtime stills indicate the versioning of resemblance, a system Tati creates that make the visual information within the film relational and prone to transfiguration. Film accessible from https://www.criterion.com/films/651-playtime

86 There are several techniques in the film that are repeated, creating a generative structure where each iteration shifts the perceptual understanding of the system. One such technique is the creation of sight gags through the compressions of space [Fig. 43]. This humorous technique is also reflexive in that these different images highlight the mediated construction of the image. The gag’s success is determined by the angle of the camera. Likewise, each repetition of this technique makes visible the stylistic system that Tati has created. This is a visual system that is not about narrative immersion but about ways of seeing and how interest and attention are captured.

Figure 43 has been removed due to copyright restrictions.

Figure 43. Playtime stills indicate compressions of space, a technique Tati versions throughout the film. Film accessible from https://www.criterion.com/films/651-playtime

This destabilising of perception and reception through versioning presents ‘observation’ as the critical project of Playtime. This metapictorial film, like this research project, foregrounds how images and observers are shaped by technologies and cultures of vision. Within my own practice, I use similar perceptual tactics and formal strategies of density and versioning to antagonise and disrupt normalising systems of representation. Some of these I have already discussed in previous sections of this paper, such as the versioning between depictive processes (studio photography and digital software) to create a system of resemblance. In closing this chapter, I want to extend this by providing more examples of how versioning operates in my practice.

87 In my studio process, versioning acts as a type of generative system drawing from a working archive of images and objects that is mutable and inherently continuous. The images that I produce are often circulated back into the archive to make new work, and the contents of the photographs are regularly recycled between the constructed assemblages. This system presents a material and semiotic mobility that seeks to reference the contemporary image networked environment. I aim to make the individual image compositions feel as if they are slices from a larger image flow, where the content moves, changes and forms new associations. This unfixed quality means that there is never a final version or moment, rather a shifting of relations within a moving and evolving system. This process also allows me to be less pedantic about an image not working. For instance, a section of an image from one shoot may be printed and fed back into the system to become a background in another picture. This reabsorption of material into the system means that figure-ground relationships are constantly collapsing in and between the photographs as seen in red apples, sport shorts (2020) [Fig. 44]. Similarly, this departing and returning means that one possibility is not pitted against the other. Instead, they are versions of relations within the system. Each iteration changes the previous appearance and when exhibited a modulatory language emerges. The emphasis here is on a dissipation of hierarchy that foregrounds movement between spatial, material and semiotic relations.

Figure 44. Skye Wagner, red apples, sport shorts, 2020, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 39.5 x 29 cm

89 Through the versioning of subjects, images and materials, ideas of comparison and distinction are made present in my work. This accumulation of a comparative visual language is evident in the single images I produce, as well as between the images that comprise this ever-expanding body of work. This system, although containing ‘types’ and ‘repetitions’ of things, is inherently mutable and relational, far from the rational order of a bureaucratic archive. Simultaneously fragmented and multiple, my assemblages mix old and new media and entangle 3D and 2D forms, highlighting how new relationalities and ways of perceiving can be produced. In particular, I often version materials and images to disrupt the legibility of the perceptual plane. In cream zipper, red delicious, shuttlecock (2020) [Fig. 45], versions of tomatoes have been assembled to be photographed (including physical tomatoes, photos which I had previously taken of tomatoes printed at different scales and on different paper stocks, and plastic packaging that has tomatoes on it). Likewise, there are elements from the image red apples, sport shorts (2020) [Fig. 44] in this photograph. This material stuttering is two-fold: it pictures the reproductive capacity of the photographic medium and it presents a language of the digital mutability through physical means.

In 2018, I held an exhibition, Not Set (2018) at Wellington Street Projects, as a forum to experiment with versioning in the gallery space. In this two-person exhibition with Alia Parker, I presented several images, including two large images on one gallery wall that were made from two separate assemblages and two smaller images on the opposite wall that were photographs of the same assemblages shot from different angles and with a different camera [Fig. 46]. The larger images are more controlled. Produced with the ‘ideal’ digital illusion in mind, they were shot and constructed from a fixed aerial vantage point with even lighting across the assemblage. The smaller photographs were shot once I had completed the ‘ideal’ construction. This second process involved documenting the assemblage by photographing it from different angles in a systematised way. Although this approach was quite methodical, the resulting images are generally looser than the ‘ideal’ versions. As a consequence, these images tend to have more pronounced shadows and thus render depth and form in some cases with more legibility. These different versions in the gallery present contradicting depictive strategies and representational uncertainties that prompt the viewer to look again.

Figure 45. Skye Wagner, cream zipper, red delicious, shuttlecock, 2020, pigment print on Ilford Fibre paper, 60 x 45 cm

Figure 46. Installation views of the exhibition Not Set at Wellington St Projects, Sydney, 25 July – 5 August. 2018. Works from top left: Skye Wagner, Peach, 88 x 117 cm; Green Apple, 88 x 117 cm; Orange Nail, 26 x 41 cm; Splash, 39 x 45 cm; Spill, 40 x 53 cm, pigment prints mounted on alupanel. Documentation images: Brett East

92 To further this perceptual doubt, I use my perceptual experiences in the studio to inform the ‘finished’ works. What signals to me that I have completed a construction is when I start to lose perceptual control. This occurs when I look through the viewfinder of the camera and it starts to become impossible to take the entirety of the image in; it is too dense with too much going on. This requires me to scan the image in parts, signalling to me that the image has become its own entity and I am no longer capable of containing its complexity. This starts to overwhelm me and the incessant looking starts to affect my perception. My eyes usually hurt and my brain starts to be tricked. For example, I might start to physically miscalculate the depth at which I have placed an object and start to confuse the printed images with the 3D counterparts. These sensations can be seen as an embodied method that I use to determine when to complete an image. It is these sensations and loss of dimensionality that I am hoping to transfer through my work and into a viewing experience where the viewer questions their faculties and the representations they see. Ngai states the interesting is ‘not just an adjective but a verb for associating’; it is about the circulation and movement between contexts, subjects and forms.106 This processual focus is foregrounded here, the artwork becomes a conduit for a transference of affect that draws a continuum between the perceptual acts (making and reception), situating these contexts into a network of relations.

Opacity Shift is the ‘final’ exhibition (or current version) of this research project. It includes a selection of work that was constructed and reconstructed throughout my candidature. The exhibition takes on a relatively conventional display format in a ‘white cube’ gallery. The main rationale for this is to leverage the authority and apparatus of the gallery; to use the controlled conventions of gallery viewership to focus the attention on the operations within and between the photographs on display. With this paced and sequenced mode of looking, my aim is to capture enough of the viewers’ time to challenge their expectations of ‘reading’ my works. While alternative presentations and formats are possible, this measured mode of display has emerged as the most apt way to allow the ideas of the work to be expressed. In staging the exhibition in this way, I recognise that the gallery site and its relationship to aesthetic

106 Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories, 114. 93 capitalism has been contested and debated across a range of artistic practices since early Modernity. In a contemporary context, I am interested in engaging with this exhibition model because of its roots in modernist consumer fetishism and because of the opportunities it affords in my interrogation of aesthetic capitalism.

It is important to acknowledge that the gallery is in no way exterior to the aesthetic capital concerns addressed in this thesis. Indeed, it is often a literal and transparent marketplace. The approach of Opacity Shift should be located within the understanding that alternative modes of address inside and outside the gallery (such as installation, performance, relational exchange, digital publication) are also forms capable of becoming commodities. These practices can be and are purchased, collected, distributed in the same marketplace and more broadly fetishized in the experience and information economy as more physically discrete works.107 These forms can at times present the ‘look’ of difference, critique, dissent or non- compliance with the art market system because they are not neatly a product (or formally seductive). However, as I have discussed, in this thesis experiences, events and artistic modes of critique have been readily co-opted within advanced capitalism to strengthen and evolve it in ways which often hides the capitalist systems exploitative operations (as discussed in Chapter 1). I state this not to pit one mode of address against the other (as I am interested in all), but to acknowledge the art world and aesthetic capitalism are deeply wedded and are constantly evolving. My artistic processes and artform iterations are attempts to non-didactically question, sometimes suspend paradoxes and ultimately be responsive to what can be learnt working within a complex and ‘impure’ space.

The artworks in Opacity Shift have been chosen for their communicative potential with the other works in the exhibition. The works selected repeat processes, visual motifs, colours and textures in different ways. The aim is to create a syntax that is mirage-like where each work subtly gives novel pictorial information that changes and questions the reading of the other works within the network. Likewise, I have consciously

107 Artists often rely on digital platforms to distribute their artforms. Digital platforms such as Instagram, YouTube, TiKTok, Vimeo are complicit spaces that mobilize artistic labour to sell advertising for the platforms’ capital gains.

94 included images that provide keys to my working methods such as seen in blue check, wilted radishes, (2020) [Fig. 16]. This transparency opens the work up to the viewer, allowing artistic processes and studio methods to enter the exhibitions space. To produce this visual grammar (that is, artworks that attempt to show one how to look at the other artworks), the works are hung at standard eye height linearly with ample spacing, affording an intimacy with each work and a slower reading process across the gallery space. The hope in creating this regulated viewing experience (provided by the pseudo-abstracted space of the gallery) is that the images seen in the gallery will infect and inform the viewer’s perception in the world outside the gallery so, for example, the next time the viewer buys a tomato at the supermarket, looks at a tarp, or does a google image search the familiarity of what they are seeing is destabilised.

The exhibited photographs have a seductive surface crispness that is a result of high- quality capture and printing techniques. However, this surface slickness contrasts with the ‘poor’ materiality of the photograph’s contents, thus the photographs hold a formal and material inequality.108 I have used high-resolution cameras to create the photographs and printed them with careful attention to paper stock, colour and tonal rendering. On the other hand, the materials I use in the assemblages are familiar, found freely in consumer settings, and at a low cost. They signal to different modes of image, commodity and temporal circulation and once assembled they express an affective, haptic and consumeristic excess. These accessible materials include images gleaned from online stock and product catalogues, which have then been printed using cheap office paper, pictures found in discarded thrift books and magazines and food purchased in supermarkets.

These poor materials and semiotic surfaces point to the circulation of value and taste in consumer contexts. They reference the ways that slickness and crappiness can point to desire, waste and social composition. I am interested in how poor taste and poor materials can be assembled in ways that give them serious attention and

108 The word poor here is drawing on Hito Steyerl’s usage in her essay In Defence of the Poor Image (discussed in Chapter 2) in which she uses the material properties of digital files to discuss the social agency of ‘quality’. Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2012).

95 produce a shiny unease in the resulting artforms. The process of transcribing and transmuting such materials in high-definition is my attempt to give this new visibility and meaning.

In doing so types of ‘quality’ are put into dialogue and materially versioned through camera capture and the printed image. For instance, a pixelated anonymous stock image that has been ripped from an online space and printed cheaply performs its ‘quality’ in the assemblage. A material quality which allows it to be speedy serves no function once its algorithmic links are cut and it is performed on the surface of a piece of paper. The index of this redundancy is a pictorial softness. However, this softness or refusal of depictive clarity of the printed surface is contrasted with the sharpness of the paper texture and its fibrous edge which the camera defines with crispness. The camera renders the details of the paper’s material and temporal fragility with precision. Likewise, I have paid careful attention to how the final photographs are printed to maintain sharpness, colour fidelity and tonal shifts. These layers of informational and quality disjunction are vital disclosures within the work which have been enabled through formal decisions.

The works are printed at a 1:1 scale, a life-sized fidelity that results in different sized artworks.109 This faithfulness to the actual scale is a counterbalance to the deceptive strategies I have employed in the construction process. These dual approaches are used to suspend the perceptual legibility of the representation and create a subtle play of similarity and difference that activate the interesting as an aesthetic mode in the work. Likewise, there will be two handlings of images; some are framed works and others are mounted on alupanel. Again, this is a deliberate strategy to create different registers in the reception of the work. The framed works feature images that were shot and resolved from a fixed vantage point and are generally denser in content, whereas the majority of mounted works are sections of larger constructions and taken from different camera positions.

109 This means the physical content in the assemblage will be the actual size of that content. For example, a strawberry will be the size of the strawberry that was in the assemblage. 96 The titling system adds a third register and follows a similar logic of fragmentation. Each title appears to be an extraction from a larger list of descriptive words, a text version of the growing image flow. These non-capitalised titles are pairs of descriptive words followed by commas that use a rhythm to signal to ongoing movement. The words describe the pictorial content, which includes food, clothing, ordinary objects, body parts and animals. Collectively, these choices signal to an image environment that is circulating, fragmentary and existing outside of that which is depicted in the exhibition. Versioning, therefore, appears throughout my work not only in the exhibited outcomes but also in my studio processes. Thus, Opacity Shift represents an iteration of my metapictorial explorations of staging and versioning.

Figure 47. Skye Wagner, black grid, dusty tape, 2020, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 46 x 55 cm

CONCLUSION

99 Throughout this research, I have considered how contemporary image-based artists use metapictorial strategies to critically engage with the commodified and staged aesthetics of late capitalism. I have argued that this allows artists to engage with the materials, processes and aesthetics of consumer culture while simultaneously restructuring their appearance as a means of critique. Consequently, these practices signal to the aesthetic hegemony of late capitalism, while destabilising the modes of representation used to distribute its forms. This project, therefore, argues that the seemingly contradictory co-presence of vernacular content with reflexive mediation (staging and versioning) in contemporary image-based art practices can offer new visibilities and affective experiences that resist and rework dominant and normative ways of seeing and making sense. This process of simultaneously inhabiting and re-imaging offers new potentials to better understand the problems, urgencies and possibilities of living in an increasingly complex aesthetic sphere.

As suggested in Chapter One, aesthetic interpretation today has become increasingly complex. By considering the unfolding of aesthetic capitalism and the minor aesthetic categories of the cute and zany, I argued that it is crucial to understand how aesthetic experience intersects with social and economic contexts today. I then situated the metapictorial strategies of individual artists, art movements and my practice within this larger sphere of cultural production. I presented staging as a correlative descriptor and device; a means to articulate both the evolving aesthetic environment and a critical artistic strategy. I claimed that it can be used to manipulate the perceptual coherence and meaning-making potential of familiar representational forms.

Chapter Two followed a similar logic of reflecting and restructuring processes and ideologies that exist in a larger social sphere. I developed the term versioning to explain a conductive process for considering information flows and the ongoing transformative operations within systems. In particular, this term was used to articulate the informatic and modulating relations between social, technological and art systems. Here, the context of the 1960s was discussed as a distinctive iterative moment when modernisations (technological, design and communication) developed systems that have subsequently given shape to today’s global networked society. These shifts and the typological impetus seen in Conceptual Art were correlated with

100 a discussion of the interesting and the simulated city presented in the film Playtime. In this chapter, I argued that this movement and dispersal between contexts and systems of understanding has led to new aesthetic relations in the contemporary moment. Central to my argument is that versioning, as a formal strategy evident in Playtime and my practice, acts as a metapictorial inquiry that draws attention to the malleable and networked nature of representation and the reciprocal process of observational understanding.

This thesis has presented staging and versioning as methodological tools for critically engaging with how things ‘appear’ in the world. They are used as artistic strategies to bring awareness and possibilities to depictive processes, as well as being descriptors that point to aspects of social and cultural organisation. The increasing aestheticisation, financialisation and mediation of all facets of everyday life organise and structure experiences, power relations and feelings in ways that are difficult to parse and apprehend. Thus, it has been my argument that the artistic strategies discussed offer interpretive and creative approaches necessary to better apprehend and make visible the complexities within this paradigm.

As discussed in the introduction to this thesis, I recognise and acknowledge that there is some instability, fragmentation and duplication in this argument. Like my photographic assemblages, I hope that this thesis gives form to experiences of intensity and fragmentation, where elements and ideas appear on the move, partial and capable of imploding. Although the chapters Staging and Versioning are separated, I have suggested their implicit relationality and interdependence. Likewise, there are ideas from each chapter that have been left floating, waiting to be assembled and reassembled with ideas from other parts of the paper. These hopeful connections, like the ‘dormant’ pictures in my archive, point to some of the speculative potential of future research.

101 The defining outcome of this research has been the development of a processual and relational studio methodology, and an understanding of how this can be activated and iterated to critically rethink today’s normative conventions of aesthetic capitalism. Staging and versioning are metapictorial tools for artists to assemble forms and ideas while maintaining the potential for further reconfiguration and renewal. This processual emphasis has offered me new ways to consider not only operations of making meaning, but also productive ways of working with and against dominant processes, technologies and forms that are encountered daily. Ultimately, I hope that this practice-based research encourages acts of observation and offers new ways to consider the commodified and staged aesthetics of late capitalism. Comprehension of this complex aesthetic regime discloses how power, affect and visibility are produced and distributed. It is through these understandings that spaces for perceptual resistance and possibility may be formed.

102

Figure 48. Skye Wagner, bucket spill, baseball, stone hand, 2020, pigment print mounted on alupanel, 46 x 55 cm

103 BIBLIOGRAPHY

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104 Cramer, Florian. “What Is ‘Post-Digital’?” in Postdigital Aesthetics: Art, Computation and Design, edited by David M. Berry and Michael Dieter, 12-26. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2015. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1992. Crimp, Douglas. “Pictures,” October 8 (1979): 75-88. Debord, Guy. Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Editions Buchet-Chastel, 1967. Translated by Ken Knabb, London: Rebel Press, 2004. Dubois, Philippe. “Trace-Image to Fiction-Image: The unfolding of Theories of Photography from the ‘80s to the Present,” October 158, (2016): 155-166. Elias, Ana Sofia, Rosalind Gill, and Christina Scharff. Aesthetic Labour Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism. London, United Kingdom: Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2017. Flusser, Vilém. Into the Universe of Technical Images. Translated by Nancy Ann Roth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. Flusser, Vilém. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. London: Reaktion, 2000. Foster, Hal. Design and Crime: And Other Diatribes. London: Verso, 2002. Foster, Hal. The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. New York: New Press, 2002. Foster, Hal. Bad New Days: Art, Criticism, Emergency. Brooklyn, New York: Verso, 2017. Glocker, Melanie L, Daniel D. Langleben, Kosha Ruparel, James W. Loughead, Ruben C. Gur, and Norbert Sachser. “Baby Schema in Infant Faces Induces Cuteness Perception and Motivation for Caretaking in Adults.” Ethology 115, no. 3 (2009): 257-63. Godfrey, Mark. “On Display.” Frieze, Issue 143 (01 Nov 2011). https://frieze.com/article/display. Groys, Boris. ‘From Image to Image File – and Back: Art in the Age of Digitisation,’ Art Power, MIT Press, Cambridge MA & London, (2008): 83-91. Groys, Boris. In the Flow. London: Verso Books, 2016. Hand, Martin. Ubiquitous Photography, Cambridge: Polity, 2013. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

105 Hilliker, Lee. “In the Modernist Mirror: Jacques Tati and the Parisian Landscape.” The French Review 76, no. 2 (2002): 318-29. Jacobs, Steven, and Hilde D'haeyere. “Frankfurter Slapstick: Benjamin, Kracauer, and Adorno on American Screen Comedy.” October 160 (2017): 30-50. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Julier, Guy. “From Visual Culture to Design Culture.” Design Issues 22, no. 1 (2006): 64-76. Kant, Immanuel. “The Critique of Judgement.” Translated by James Creed Meredith. 1911. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. Kracauer, Siegfried. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995. Kracauer, Siegfried, and Thomas Y. Levin. “Photography.” Critical Inquiry 19, no. 3 (1993): 421-36. Krauss, Rosalind. “A Note on Photography and the Simulacral.” October 31 (1984): 49-68. Krauss, Rosalind. “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution.” October 77 (1996): 83-96. Krug, Steve. Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability. 2nd ed. Berkeley, Calif.: New Riders Publishing, 2006. Kuspit, Donald. “Sol LeWitt: The Look of Thought,” Art in America 63 (1975): 42-49. Lütticken, Sven. “General Performance”, e-flux journal 31, (12 April 2017). http://www.e-flux.com/journal/general-performance/. Lyotard, Jean-François, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994. Marx, Karl. Capital, vol.1, A critique of political economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes, New York: Penguin, 1992. Merriam-Webster Online, s.v. “Version” accessed 2 May 2019. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/version. Mitchell, W. J. T. What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

106 Mitchell, W. J. T. “The Future of the Image: Rancière’s Road Not Taken.” Culture, Theory and Critique 50, no. 2-3 (2009/07/01 2009): 133-44. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Myerscough, Paul. “The Pret Buzz.” London Review of Books Vol. 35 No. 1, (3 January 2013). https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n01/paul-myerscough/short-cuts. Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science: With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Cambridge, U.K. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Osborne, Peter. “Is it Interesting? Judgments of the moderns from Schlegel to Judd and beyond,” 1 Oct. 2015. Backdoor Broadcasting Company: Academic Podcasts, 60:10 min. https://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2015/10/peter-osborne-is-it-interesting- judgments-of-the-moderns-from-schlegel-to-judd-and-beyond/. Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism.” October 12 (1980): 67-86. Owens, Craig. “The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism Part 2.” October 13 (1980): 78-79. Daniel Palmer: Govett-Brewster Symposium 2016. YouTube video, 1:00:34, “Govett- Brewster Art Gallery.” 10 Aug. 2016. https://youtu.be/FERveo6KWSo. Rancière, Jacques. Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art. London: Verso, 2013. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. Movies as Politics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, and Jacques Tati. “Tati's Democracy an Interview and Introduction by Jonathan Rosenbaum.” Film Comment 9, no. 3 (1973): 36-41. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, N.C. London: Duke University Press, 2003.

107 Sontag, Susan. On photography. London: Penguin, 2002. Stein, Gertrude. Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms. Mineola, N.Y. : Dover Publications, 1997. Steyerl, Hito. “Digital Debris: Spam and Scam.” October,138, 2011. Steyerl, Hito. “Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?” e-flux journal 49, (2013):70-80. Steyerl, Hito. The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. Tati, Jacques, dir. Playtime. 1967; United States: Criterion Collection, 2001. Thompson, Kristin. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,1988. Trimble, Morgan J and Rudi J. Van Aarde. “Species Inequality in Scientific Study Inequidad De Especies En El Estudio Científico.” Conservation Biology 24, no. 3 (2010): 886-90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1523-1739.2010.01453.x. Turvey, Malcom. “Comedic Modernism.” October 160, (2017). 5-29. Vierkant, Artie. The Image Object Post-Internet. 2010. http://jstchillin.org/artie/pdf/The_Image_Object_Post-Internet_a4.pdf. Wark, Mckenzie. “Our Aesthetics.” Verso (blog), June 27th, 2017. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3291-our-aesthetics. Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. First edition. ed. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

108

APPENDIX

The following pages includes documentation from the final exhibition that concluded my MFA research.

Skye Wagner: Opacity Shift 21 March – 18 April 2020, UNSW Galleries Sydney.

UNSW Galleries exhibition page: https://artdesign.unsw.edu.au/unsw-galleries/skye-wagner-opacity-shift

Catalogue essay PARTIAL VIEWS: On Skye Wagner’s Opacity Shift written by Naomi Riddle, accessible here: https://artdesign.unsw.edu.au/sites/default/files/atoms/files/opacity_shift_essay_2020.pdf

109 EXHIBITION BLURB

Skye Wagner’s photographs explore the circulation and digital malleability of contemporary images. Constructed from physical objects and printed imagery, they assemble vernacular photographic tropes, commodity goods, and cultural fragments.

The source images and objects are released from their prescribed function and become part of an unruly network that moves throughout works in the exhibition. Animals, food, body parts and consumer products all form incongruous relations that confuse perspectives, materials and normative codes. In this mix, things appear out of control, on the verge of becoming something else, and wanting to escape the confines of the frame.

Digital post-production techniques, such as duplicating and liquefying, are acted out with the physical materials transposing software processes into physical space. These system-shifting tactics of rephotographing photographs and translating digital processes, model how visibilities and representations can be destabilised, altered and reconstructed.

Figure 49. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries.

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Figure 50. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries.

Fi gure 51. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries.

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Figure 52. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

Figure 53. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, left to right: breadsticks, cream stripes, 2020; cream stripes, breadsticks, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

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Figure 54. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, left to right: fake lashes, shin bone, marble touch, 2020; folded crackers, woven cane, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

Figure 55. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, folded crackers, woven cane, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

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Figure 56. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, left to right: bucket spill, baseball, stone hand, 2020; beige trousers, bread slice, neck brace, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

Figure 57. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries.

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Figure 58. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, golden chalice, egg yolk, seashells, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries.

Figure 59. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries.

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Figure 60. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, left to right: blue tarp, 2020; pink soap, apple stitch, puppy eyes, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries.

Figure 61. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, sticky sand, matchstick, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

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Figure 62. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

Figure 63. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

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Figure 64. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, rhino glove, elbow joint, corn cakes, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

Figure 65. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, left to right: black grid, dusty tape, 2020; red apples, sport shorts, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

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Figure 66. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries.

Figure 67. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Document Photography. Courtesy UNSW Galleries.

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Figure 68. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, left to right: chilli pairs, chrome pipe, stress ball, 2020; flamingo smile, bandaids, breadsticks, 2020, UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

Figure 69. Skye Wagner, Opacity Shift, 21 March – 18 April 2020, installation view, blue check, wilted radishes, 2020 UNSW Galleries, Sydney. Image: Skye Wagner.

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