LUMINAL–KINETICS AUSTRALIAN MODERNISM: ARTIFICIAL LIGHT IN AUSTRALIAN ART an interpretive history

Abstract

The work of Australian artists who have incorporated artificial light into their works, (in ‘luminal-kinetics’), is the subject of this thesis. The term does not refer to the ‘technological spaces’ of light, as elaborated in photography or electronic screen devices, but to artists who have dealt with ‘embodied light’ by incorporating artificial light (and in one instance, natural light), into artworks, under the belief that illumination and motion are central themes of modern life. And in the twenty-first century, Indigenous artist Jonathan Jones has claimed the territories of (Western) modernism and light under an Indigenous politic to re-present bi-cultural encounters and histories. This constitutes a radically under-analysed area of Australian artistic practice, with thematics that both traverse expansive terrains, and include commonalities - such as a concern with utopian ideals, with synaesthesia, and with interdisciplinarity. Nonetheless the thesis does not mount an argument for luminal-kinetics as constituting a movement, style, or credo within Australian art. The claim it does make however, is that the medium of light, as a material, energy and a concept, has been a generative agent for the artists studied: that in light they recognised intrinsic qualities or some affective agency which enabled them to move into larger artistic arenas. I will argue that this phenomenon rests on the particular capacity of light to ‘seep’ between categories, media, artforms, and between cultural and social formations. This capacity, along with light’s symbolic potency, has amplified artistic practices, and enabled Jonathan Jones to position light as a central element in his de-colonising and Indigenising of Western visualisations, in order to re-configure the relationship which has existed between modernism and colonialism. The thesis argues that luminal-kinetics is an artistic form in which concepts concerning the material and immaterial, technological and metaphysical, and static and kinetic, take precedence over modernism’s traditional binaries, and thus it calls for alternative frameworks through which to analyse and theorise Australian modernism.