Durational Painting: gifting, grafting, hosting, collaborating

This thesis takes as its focus contemporary painting, and develops an understanding of painting as a time-based medium. My research project addresses the array of strategies artists employ to produce durational paintings, a term I have coined as a means of referring to paintings that destabilise the traditional idea of painting as a static object, hung on a wall. The medium of painting embraces other mediums, such as performance and installation, to yield durational paintings. These paintings engage people in their production: vitally, they are participatory and are produced through collaboration. Furthermore, these paintings employ materials imbued with particular properties, such as longevity or, conversely, ephemerality. In time-based media collections and in existing histories of participatory and relational practices painting is absent: these omissions are redressed by the present study. Now that painting is time-based, it is ‘live’.