Sprung from an avant-garde heritage, contemporary art often meets, overlaps and collides with ordinary everyday life, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. For an artist working in this field, the relationship between art and life can be particularly intriguing; sometimes it’s puzzling, other times it can be hard to tell one from the other, to know when something is or isn’t art and when it is or isn’t life.
“In the In-Between: Explorations into the Line Between Art and Everyday Life as Seen Through the Eyes of a Practising Visual Artist” asks what new approaches, methods, techniques this collision can reveal and what alternative ways of thinking and viewing it can lead to, which help to understand the mysterious relationship between art and life.
The starting point of the doctoral thesis is direct art practice and related processes. The work involves bodily and multisensoral experiences, uses humor and a playful approach that characterizes the relationship between three fictional friends – Thea the Cleaner, Olive Cotton and the Artist Researcher. The use of imaginary characters enables the exchange of perspectives and helps to highlight the different ways in which art and everyday life meet and collide in the processes where the artist prepares the exhibition, creates the works, installs the exhibition, and then reflects on the three exhibitions on which the doctoral thesis is based, while considering the cleaning performances (which made mainly by Thea the Cleaner), with other exhibitions and everyday life.
As it turns out during the research, one of the goals of the work is to reconcile art, making art, everyday life and research from the perspective of a practicing artist. Three imaginary friends play an important role in achieving this, as well as the tactic of in-betweenness and the concepts of bricolage. Through this, the methods and approaches of “blurring”, “alienation”, “equalization” and “destabilization” and “object-based thinking” are formulated and conceptualized in the doctoral thesis, which help to change, understand and reconcile art and everyday life from the perspective of a visual artist.
Supervisor: Dr. Liina Unt (University of Tartu), Dr. Jan Guy (University of Sidney)
Preliminary reviewers: Dr. Rolf Hughes (European Institute of Innovation and Technology, Culture & Creativity), Prof. Mika Elo (University of the Arts Helsinki)
Opponent: prof. Mika Elo (University of the Arts Helsinki)
Copy editor: Michael Haagensen
Translator of Estonian summary: Tiina Randus
Series design template: Indrek Sirkel
Design and layout: Pärtel Eelmere
Dissertations Academiae Artium Estoniae 45
268 pages, in English
Estonian Academy of Arts, 2024
ISBN 978-9916-740-22-4 (print)
ISBN 978-9916-740-23-1 (pdf)
ISSN 1736-2261