Decoration: Disrupting the Workplace and Challenging the Work of Art

This practice-led research proposes that decoration can be deployed as a lens for the illumination and interrogation of class and hierarchy when used in artworks which address the workplace. Photographic topologies conducted for the research highlight hierarchical values exemplified in the workplace; they are revealed as alienating places where, on the whole, luxury and decoration are restrained or only considered appropriate for those in seniority. Looking at the ways in which space is organised (Lefebvre 1991) and how this can be contested though the introduction of site-related art (Deutsche 1996; Mouffe 2007), the spatial interventions made for this research are intended to ‘puncture’ the workplace and allow for the interrogative quality that Deutsche demands of art in public places. The artworks highlight hierarchical values and, at the same time, disturb these values through their placement, materials, form, method of production and their singularity. The language of decoration provides connective qualities which offset this criticality and afford the artwork a negotiating potential, providing a politics of pleasure. Thus, these decorative artworks possess dual value in critiquing aspects of status and alienation in the workplace while at the same time contributing an ameliorative function. The use of decorative elements in artworks and the placement of such artworks in work-related contexts is made in close relationship to theoretical readings. These include references to the ‘everyday’ (Lefebvre 1947, 1962; de Certeau 1984) which propose that it is through praxis that the individual is able to respond creatively using tactics of bricolage and re-appropriation to alter the conditions of everyday life. The everyday working practices of the workplace are further considered in relation to the work of the artist and the ‘work’ of art. Secondly, the practice is informed by Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (1979) as a way of conceptualising class and which, in its attention to the predispositions of the individual, is able to encompass attitudes to decoration. Together with the practice itself, these approaches address the interrogative and disruptive agency of the decorative in fine art practice.

The author of this thesis has permanently restricted access to the text.