Artistic production in the Central Queensland region: Politics and practice

The field of artistic production has received considerable attention from art history, sociology, art theory and feminism, among others, which together have produced a well -established body of literature. The dominant perspective on art positions it as the privileged site of aesthetic production and enjoyment, a field is distanced from external necessity, and inhabited by agents who possess a particular artistic charisma, one which 'naturally' disposes them to practise their art. This dissertation engages with these discourses, and in the process attempts to map out the field of artistic production, with specific attention to the structure of the field in the Central Queensland region. Using a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches, and engaging particularly with the writings of Pierre Bourdieu, it focuses on the imbrication of arts within the fields of the social, the government and the economy, and analyses the connections between arts discourses, and the place of 'the arts' in each of these cultural fields. This requires an engagement with the question of the constitution of artistic subjectivities, the constitution of communities, the commoditisation of practice, and the role of habitus and capital in disposing agents to engage variously in cultural, fields. Finally, it examines the ways in which artists alternately internalise or resist institutional discourses and practices, and negotiate the regulatory mechanisms and 'regimes of truth' that are produced within the social.