Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Art stripped of spectacle, novelty, the imperative to inform and the optical, is art liberated from collection and commodification and reveals the compelling inner action of art in human communities. Invisible artwork exist independent of a colonial/masculine imperative to be useful, valuable and inform but they enact a vital public pedagogy of hospitality by demanding a welcoming mode of attention from witness and participant and preparing us to be courageous and curious. Such artworks use the material of intentionality, eschew authorship and foreground supports. They emanate a dignified aesthetic of being. Their existence is embedded in bodies but often conveyed through written documentation. My doctoral research examined inter-subjective representation by shifting a representational drawing practice into acts of undocumented socially engaged art. Over 5 years my ‘drawings’ were enacted in sites such as parliament, court rooms, town-halls, homes and boardrooms. I was interested in the moment of encounter and the continuum of obligation as the most minimal evidence of art production. While ostensibly useless, personally contingent, esoteric, dyadic and impossibly vague, these acts of encounter and obligation were grounded in a universal human experience, our most basic of human rights: the right to exist and to belong, and the right to relationship. My artwork which finds its theory in social practice or contemporary performance and attempts to shift representational art from ‘about-ness’ to ‘is-ness’; from the captured to the fluid. This paper outlines my practice journey as a case study in multidisciplinary post-studio invisible aesthetics.