Abstract

This exegesis aims to assess the communicative power of assemblage-based installation art. The body of research underlying this assessment provides tools for understanding experimental assemblage-based installation practices and their affective nature. The exegesis tracks discourses between contemporary assemblage-based practices and recent philosophy on aesthetics. It reviews mechanisms used by contemporary artists to engage the spectator that resist existing aesthetic structures and assert new communicative visual forms. Definitions of ‘the contemporary’ are employed to help situate the dialectic of forms. By way of applying some key concepts of philosopher Gilles Deleuze to methods of production, the assessment proposes a symbiotic relationship between Deleuzian philosophy and assemblage-based practices. Deleuze’s ‘affect’, ‘de-stratification’, ‘repetition’ and ‘assemblage’ are the main theories applied to this a posteriori relationship. This exegesis investigates artists’ methods of sign manipulation such as compositions of repetitions, rhythms and durations. The experience of the spectator is investigated from the key positions of three disciplines of thought. How the brain processes information when viewing art is examined by way of readings from commentator Jacques Ranciere, philosopher David Hume and neurologist Vilayanaur Ramachandran. This establishes a speculative foundation for the relationship between the spectator and ‘the sign’. In terms of linguistics and visual forms, a critical analysis is applied to ‘signs’ to analyse the practices of artists who challenge established form and narrative structures. Readings of Foucault’s ‘dispositif’ and Giorgio Agamben’s analogous ‘apparatus’ are used to articulate systems of communication and their compositions of elements. It is put forward that an artist’s assemblage of signs is the dispositif of their practice. This analysis posits that, asserting new and non-linear forms rather than following pre-existing models can be a powerful means for affective and lucid communication. Chapter IV of this exegesis presents a discussion of examples of my work completed as part of the research. This chapter is a more reflective expression of my motivations for creating assemblage-based installation focused on form and meaning