On the Blank

Abstract

My visual practice is concerned with an articulation of the 'left-out-thing', remnant or blank, produced by and embedded within technologies of representation, which themselves echo the mechanisms through which an identity is formed. As automatic, 'empty apparatus', technological devices threaten as well as construct this self image. This thesis proposes a new theoretical interpretation for art practices that engage with this empty space, or 'shifter'; understood as a form of punctuation around which meaning revolves. Indexing an object both absent and 'has been', the kind of mark making that falls into this category can be identified - like an hysterical symptom - as the reproduction of an unrepresentable sign. It is through my practical work, which explores the link between the photograph, the body, and the written sentence, that my contribution to the field of fine art practice is primarily offered. The way in which an image is put together or a sentence is organised can be considered as an exemplary definition of subjectivity in operation. Yet, as Ann Banfield (1987) has argued, after the invention of the lens, novelistic writing began to index a 'world without a self'. My visual work, which frequently looks like writing, attempts to construct a similar 'grammatical' form: one in which the 'I' is absent. The aim of my work is to stage or record this empty place, understood as a disturbance, impediment or failure within speech; as the text's undertow; and equated with a photographic - or optical -'unconscious'. This failure, this fault in language, detected in the lapses, gaps and silences within a body of writing or in an image - a gap upon which such language systems are nevertheless hinged - is, I suggest, both the place where technology and the non-self are linked and, paradoxically, the site where the I is constituted