Whats Up Doc?

The Creative PhD Seminar


Speakers:
Professor Andrew Barrie – School of Architecture and Planning
Dr Carol Brown – Dance Studies Programme
John Coulter – School of Music
Associate Professor Murray Edmond – English Department
Associate Professor Annie Goldson – Film, Television and Media Studies Department
Linda Tyler – Centre for New Zealand Art Research and Discovery
Dr Ruth Watson – Elam School of Fine Arts


The seminar was held in a dim dank lecture theatre redolent of Stalins’ Russia; threadbare bottle green carpet, three giant rolladex blackboards, of the type that used to be marked with a substance called chalk, and steel framed pivoting bench seats that sprang up with a clang that rang of longevity over comfort and with the concept of durability foremost in the design it occurred to me, given the age of the classroom, that we were their intended victims.

I arrived early and the seminar started late. The handler for the evening was the post grad dean Dr Nicholas Rowe, he had a cold.


As midwife to the nascent ‘creative’ Phd programme he seemed subdued but assured in his delivery of the new rules and specifications. There was only one ‘audible intake of breath’ moment when Dr Rowe asserted the 60,000 word written component of the new thesies, was to articulate the nature of the creativity embodied by the original corpus of work that comprises the remainder of the Phd. Did this mean that the evil capitalist moulinex also known as NICAI Was going to start a knowledge bank of creative practice for consumption, digestion and excretion by the business school? We wondered.

First up was John Coulter from the School of Music, suave in Armarni and black T shirt, he spoke briefly of his six year quest for the doctor hat. He had attached a bugle or some other musical instrument to a retinal scanner, so when the performer / listener peered into the eyepiece they came away with their own tune played by their eye movements, rather than the traditional inky circle.
The snippet that Dr Coulter lulled us with was redolent of Eno at his most transient and left the auditorium slightly bewildered, which was no mean feat considering that this was a group of Aucklands most highly educated with minds honed to a surgical keenness by years of creative practice.

Second was Dr Carol Brown who completed a Phd in 1994 in Surrey. This was to be a theme of the evening, that the Phd’s on display bore no relationship to the one indicated on the packet.
She spoke intensely and steadily of the body, her body, the body of a dancer as the site of the embodiment of theory, all kinds of theory. She mentioned her nipples and took a wee plastic doll out of a suit case, we were mesmerized. Her theory had cleared a space for the body to fly; where ego, I go.

Prof Barry had the unenviable task of following in the wake of this humid performance. He showed his favorite map, somewhat stealing some of Ruth Watson’s thunder, which was a 1725 map of little bits of NZ, Australia and Indonesia. He saw this as analogous to knowledge; but conveniently chose to ignore the fact that the map has now been completely coloured in. The completion of global exploration seems more analogous to the new ‘creative’ Phd’s as all of the other available academic spaces have also been coloured in and the only untrodden parts are the bottom of the mariana trench and the like.

Dr Ruth Watson spoke of her maps and her thesis accrued under the old rules ( from memory the written part can fit on a postcard). She said the old rules still apply at Elam and if you wanted a Phd without the 60,000 word bit see her after class.

Linda Tyler from the Gus Fisher spoke of a mate / colleague, who had just completed a Phd in Edward Bullmore. I found this the most challenging / motivating part of the evening. Soon there will be curators buzzing around the country looking for suitable subjects of study ie. Artists and presenting exhibitions of their work as a corpus toward the thesis; WARNING major structural shift ahead.

Then Annie Goldson came along and tipped over the whole cart. She put forward a two minute trailer of Briar Graces’ successful documentary of a sinking Pacific atoll (as in; one day it won’t be there atoll). Annie said that this COULD have been a successful thesis if it had been supported by theory in areas for instance such as ‘the history of film in the Pacific’ or ‘an analysis of climate change’ then she mused about how difficult it is to make a film anyway and how the extra work would probably sink the project along with the atoll. Oh dear.

So its there, the big solipsistic entity that is a creative Phd. A giant piece of research, illustrated by a body of work, a finely crafted piece of art; self reviewed, or a dynamic, critical engine fully cognisant of contemporary theory that clears a space for the actualization of theory and the colonisation of pastures that have been left unburrowed.

Thats all folks.