Katy Macleod
°2005
en
Katy Macleod is a Reader in Fine Art at Kingston University, UK. She has taught in Art Schools in the UK for over four decades. From 1996 – 2000, she undertook research into student and supervisor experience of doctorates in Fine Art and subsequently researched into doctoral submissions, 2000-2003. Related publications include Macleod, K & Holdridge, L (Eds) (2005) “Thinking Through Art reflections on art as research” Routledge and ‘Writing and the PhD in Fine Art’ in Biggs, M & Karlsson, H(Eds) (2010) “The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts”, Routledge. Katy has extensive experience of examining in the UK.
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Exposition: Expanded Architecture 01-06 (01/01/2011) by Sarah Breen Lovett
At the time of reviewing there was insufficient evidence of a careful distillation from the fields of Art, Installation Art and Architecture to prepare the ground for innovation in the capacities of Installation Art to newly inform how architecture is experienced. Especially important in the field of Installation Art is a depth of understanding about site, context and viewer. There are essential debates within the recent histories of Installation Art concerning, for instance, institutional critique, ‘nomadism’ and discourses of subjectivity, which were not apparent in the exposition. In addition, the exposition did not fully engage with the immersive capacities of Installation Art, in terms of viewer experience. The exposition would benefit from a more richly intense identification of what it means to experience the tension between a moving image installation and architecture.
There is a sense of interruption and an interplay between the moving image and architecture which does not precisely ‘reframe’ the architecture but plays across its surfaces and openings (such as windows) without a clear understanding of sustained interrogation. It would be helpful for the viewer/reader to know the precise rationale for provoking a ‘tension’ between architecture and Installation Art. The research needs to demonstrate how this tension informs the ‘landscape of the moving image’ and to further elucidate what this ‘landscape’ is. The use of sound and light, for example, could be more fully explored to present a closer identification of the experience of Installation Art in this context.
The posing of a central question has been adequately achieved. There is some evidence of the potential for innovation, which would be greatly enhanced were the specific and particular elements of Installation Art and Architecture more fully identified. This would provide for a keener articulation of the rationale for presenting and exploring the ‘tension’ between these disciplines through moving image works. More thought needs to be given to the terms used, such as the ‘landscape of moving image’. A much tighter realisation of the researcher’s approach could be achieved through a closer engagement with the field of Installation Art and, most particularly, through other artists’ interrogation of Art, Architecture and their contexts and meanings, eg Do Ho Suh; Robert Irwin; Olafur Eliasson — to name three very diverse practices. This would help provide evidence of how to encounter the term, ‘moving image’, and to begin to interrogate more deeply what is meant by movement, for instance. This bedrock questioning has begun but needs to gain considerable impetus. There is evidence in the present submission of a lack of attention to the precise detail of what is being claimed, also to the inevitable distinctions between sources cited from different fields. At the end of this process of research, the contributor to the journal will need to have demonstrated that practice discourses of moving image installation and architecture have been newly informed in specific ways.