Surrounding pastness: emergent questions from an expanded arts practice

Abstract

This arts-based research project takes as its starting point my arts practice, which works in the three primary spaces of the Hilton Road Tunnel, my suburban garden studio and surrounds, and the gallery/museum context. Working predominantly with found materials in the suburb of Blairgowrie in northern Johannesburg. The practice also engages with an abandoned train tunnel that runs underneath my childhood hometown of Hilton in KwaZulu-Natal. It is through a practice of collecting, documenting, making, displaying and experiencing that a number of research areas emerge. These research areas are primarily split into a document and reflection on the art practice and a more formal research mode focused on writing. These ways of working develop simultaneously, with each informing the other and allowing for slippages between the two, culminating in a surrounding of emergent research questions. Research problems arise through the arts practice, rather than the arts practice providing answers to a set of predetermined questions. Over the course of the arts practice six problem areas emerge. These problems loosely relate to, the practice research nexus, objects, archives, spaces, the suburb and the museum. It is through these emergent research questions that a seventh overarching problem emerges, which is the notion of pastness as an affect that is rooted in each of these areas in different ways. Pastness emerges through the practice/research relationship and is ultimately surrounded by the emergent research questions to provide a new broader appraisal of pastness. Pastness is surrounded through the acknowledgement of vital materiality in assemblage and further highlighted through object biography. Pastness is surrounded through the development of a collage archive that serves as both a document and creative impulse for my practice. Pastness is surrounded through the dissection of architectural affect and in particular affect experienced at the Hilton Road Tunnel, pastness is revealed to be not only epic or satirical, but potentially a sacred experience. Pastness is surrounded in the suburban context and revealed to be a tool of whiteness, used to render whiteness invisible and beyond scrutiny. Pastness is surrounded in the museum context, where it is shown that the museum doesn’t present authentic objects, but cleansed recontextualised objects whose pastness is now only available through the framing of the museum