Place: Anecdote, Theory and Practice, and A Young Princess?

Abstract

This article proposes that attention to the place of art and practice facilitates both a subject-to-object and object-to-object consideration of the artwork in a way that draws anecdote, history and theory together into a single perspective. It assumes an expansion of a number of established theoretical frameworks (new historicism, apparatus theory, object-oriented ontology and actor network theory), melding anecdote, theory and arts practice in a thick description of a single academic practice that encompasses theory, history and artworks. This expansion is contained by the consideration of apparatus theory, as it is understood and used in film studies, to the examine a number of ideas, images and artefacts that represent an external participation in the place that contains them. It concludes with a photographic essay by Jacqueline Knight on a series of objects made by the author that emphasise the artwork as a mobile constellation that has a fragile relationship with a place from which it derives some temporary stability.