A 2000 word draft for my research paper. The deadline is midday (London time) tomorrow. Its just before midnight the day before (in Luxembourg), and I have just submitted it.

The last two weeks have been somewhat intense and, if honest, fueled by much caffeine and chocolate (my preferred coping method for writing papers).

My original intent, as discussed in the Research Paper Seminar was to explore “hybridity”, “mimicry”, and the “third space”, terms espoused by Homi K Bhaba in the field of contemporary post-colonial theory, which I am using in my practice to answer the question: Is it possible to take concepts from post-colonial theory (i.e. “culture” in a “society”) and apply to a visual world (e.g. “figure/ground” in a “pictorial space”).

However, when attempting to write the research paper, something just wasn’t working. One thing that kept coming back was the comment that Gareth made:

… I guess one has to be measured about the reasonable scope of this paper …

As I noted at the time, this is a bit of a hint that this might be too broad for the research paper. Following the abundance of reading that I had undertaken (see research paper bibliography), looking through the drafts of My Proposal, I came to the idea that what I needed to explore was motivation, and to, perhaps, leave “hybridity”, “mimicry”, and the “third space”, etc., for a PhD?

Here is the first page of the draft that I submitted.

Title

“Motivation in Abstract Art”.

Abstract

As the canon of abstract art developed during the early 20th century, and the modernist theory behind it, there was a progression of an epistemological model to that of ontological reduction. Despite a limited progression and somewhat consistency in the visual expression applied across the canon, the philosophical foundations behind them has changed, developing a progression in the motivation. The subject of this research paper is the motivation

Keywords

Abstract Art; Modernism; Motivation; Rationalism; Reductionism.

Bibliography

See research paper bibliography.

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