Output details

Traces and Erosion: A Case Study of the Beach in Contemporary Art Making

A) Brief Description:

The article sets out to challenge the common perception of the beach as place of transition and transformation. This article is part of a special edition of the Journal of Visual Arts Practice, edited by Christian Mieves and Philippe Cygan.

The edition developed from the international Conference ‘Revisiting the Beach’ (Newcastle University, July 2009) which was organised by the editors and funded by the AHRC and the Newcastle Institute for the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (NIASSH).

B) Research Rationale:

The article interrogates the extent to what the beach operates as a site in contemporary artistic practice for recasting and critically reworking so-called ‘postmodern’ tropes of relativism, antagonism and the rethinking of boundaries.

In recent years, the critique of postmodern approaches to questions such as truth, commitment, ideology and belief has intensified. The tendency to relativism, to the apparent detriment of critical perspectives, has led to a thorough-going questioning of the postmodern agenda and a call for a rethinking of boundaries, limits and a(nta)gonism. This article addresses these issues by introducing new ways of thinking about the beach and uses Mieves’ paintings as main case study.

C) Strategies Undertaken:

In preparation for the article, Christian Mieves presented a series of invited papers at following international conferences: ‘Self-Eater: Gender, Sexuality and Cannibalism in the Work of Dana Schutz’, 18-21 June 2009, Bern University, Switzerland; ‘Materiality and Artistic Practice in Contemporary Painting’, 15-17 April 2009, York St John’s University, UK; ‘The Beach: Liminal Spaces and Identities in Contemporary Art' 23-29 March 2008, Mexico DF, Mexico.