Breaking the frame: Challenging the concept of the chronotope in spatially expansive forms of artworking

This practice-led research investigates how installation art creates multi-chronotopic places, which layer together the chronotopic qualities of the work, the viewer, and the space of display beyond the boundaries of the traditional picture frame. The thesis transposes Mikhail M. Bakhtin’s literary concept of the chronotope into discussions about art history, theory, and my practice. I contextualise a theoretical discussion of the complex interactions between chronotopic motifs and experiences within an artwork, in line with the extended logics of collage and assemblage as practised by Robert Rauschenberg and Allan Kaprow in the late 1950s. This research argues that their practices set a key precedent for understanding the heterochronotopic potential of contemporary art because they developed intermedial processes for combining materials and parts in an open-ended way which invite pluralistic understandings of a work.

To assess the way in which this heterochronotopic potential has become central to contemporary art, I analyse the work of William Kentridge and the reason why the legacies of collage and assemblage have guided my turn to installation art, expanding my interest in the structure of layering. The exploration of multi-layered chronotopicity in my practice-led research has shifted its focus significantly during the PhD, from making works rooted in a pictorial tradition to spatially expansive forms based on dispersed unity and changeable collections of parts. This shift has been informed by the idea of intermediality and Rosalind Krauss’s notion of inter-medium relations in the age of the post-medium condition, which I have adapted into a new method of place-responsive practice through a series of residencies and iterative exhibitions. Through critical description of my ongoing project a Practiced Place (2015–), I see my artmaking process as comprising three parts, drawing on three key ideas of form to which I kept returning throughout the research journey: image, collage, assemblage.