Power, violence and control: experimenting with spatial politics and neoliberalism in the installation frame

© 2016 Lachlan AnthonyThis practice-led research explores relationships between space, power and control through investigating the use of exclusionary spatial strategies associated with neoliberalism, and globalization, to inform the production of gallery-based installation artworks. These deliberately hostile strategies are employed to reflect upon the incidence of human exclusion, spatial inequity and ideological violence manifesting in the built forms of the contemporary urban landscape. Within the gallery space, the viewer is confronted with aesthetically refined yet deterrent forms, kinetic systems and hostile devices that exert physical and psychological control. This affects the production of a spatial politic that challenges the viewers right to space and subjective agency. The use of violence and control in this contemporary spatial practice is contextualized historically by artists emerging from Minimalism and late sixties installation art that used the artistic frame to synthesize relations between politics, art and experience. Robert Morris, Graciela Carnevale and Bruce Nauman are three such artists. The artworks emerging from this project integrate several key abstract dynamics adapted from critiques of space and political economy. Drawing on left-leaning political theory, urban spatial theory, human geography and post-political theory, these dynamics include: circulation, clearance, exclusion and conditional mobility. Three works have been selected for formal presentation, these include: Circulation (2015), Vast impenetrability (2015) and Thresha (2014-15). In addition to this output several other works have been generated that extend the body of research, these include: Sprinkler Defence (2015), Sprinkler Scheme (2015), Manhole (2015). These are discussed in the paper alongside a series of sketches, physical models, three-dimensional digital models and documentary photographs that further provide a clear indication of the practical processes used to develop expanded installation form within this project