Modelling Subjectivities: Life Drawing, Popular Culture and Contemporary Art Education

Abstract

This thesis examines life-drawing as a social, cultural and aesthetic practice. It is principally concerned with the changes occurring within life-drawing classes since the mid twentieth century; and how life drawing has spread from being a highly regulated practice confined to art institutions to proliferating among a variety of recreational, semi-professional and pedagogical settings. It is also critically concerned with the discourses surrounding life-drawing, and how these discourses permeate the spaces and practices within life classes. This thesis is concerned with the blind spots in vision, the invisible spaces in the life-room, and how life-drawing as a social practice mediates and manages the imaginary spaces between all participants; spaces of desire, aspiration, alienation and agency. In examining life drawing as a constellation of discourses, aspirations and behaviours, occurring across a number of social and cultural fields, this thesis moves t hrough a number of critical disciplines. The interdisciplinary research involved in this thesis, has involved the development of a number of critical methodologies derived from cultural studies and feminist art theory, and redeployed in a critical examination of life drawing, as a social practice, as a discursive field, and as a compelling and troubling site for inter-subjective encounters. The research for this thesis has been fuelled by the author's experiences as a visual artist and artists’ model in Sydney, and informed by extensive participant observation of life-drawing classes in Australia and internationally. The research consisted of interviews with over fifty participants, comprising artists’ models, artists and senior art-educators, from Sydney, New York, Paris, and the United Kingdom. This thesis develops an account of life-drawing as a performative practice, enabling life classes to exist as liminal spaces where the boundaries between art and sex, education and recreation, and between various cultural mili! eus clai ming and affiliation with ‘high’ art are actively produced and contested. Most critically, this thesis demonstrates the necessity and possibility for the socially reflexive grounding of critical examinations of contemporary art practice. In consciously examining the tacit values aligned with institutionalised categories of art practice and examining the claims, discourses and practices within a range of professional, paraprofessional and amateur art settings, this thesis develops a rigorous interdisciplinary account of how life drawing is experienced, and how a critical understanding of art as a social and cultural practice is necessary to any appreciation of contemporary art and visual culture.