VERSUS THE VOX POPULI Reflections on the practice of art as a quest for liberation

Abstract

This dissertation is an attempt to define the constellation of circumstances and ideas, which has determined my strategy in the paintings and performances submitted for examination. Unlike many artists I do not accept the fact of postmodernity. On the contrary, art and life remain suspended between the future and the past, the essential modernist condition. I argue for this in the introduction and the first two chapters, through a description of the performance work of Joseph Beuys and on my reaction to it in a performance in which I attempted to examine the practical paradoxes of art making in late modernity. I take my position largely from the Frankfurt school and succeeding debates about their work up to Zizek. For, while we remain in modernity we cannot regard it simply as an unfinished project. It is no longer possible to adopt an avant-garde position in one's practice. The central section of the thesis contains a series of studies of the careers of major artists who have faced up to the paradoxes of modernity from Picasso to Richter and Parr. Through their successes, failures and sometimes duplicity, a practical profile emerges - a guide to the limits of contemporary practice. The last chapter concerns my paintings as a response to this profile.