Abstract

The celebrated art of Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller is, above all, productive of an intense experience. It makes an immediate and intoxicating impression. This thesis asks a simple question: What is the experience of this intense experience? Or again: How does experience function in this art? To ask these questions is to implicitly recognize the cultural construction of experience. And yet, at the same time, this thesis also explores the possibility, suggested by these two artists among others, that experience is an encounter with that which exceeds the processes of construction. This is, in other words, to look at experience as it is constituted in and by a culturally determined structure, and to look for the possible limit of such construction. This thesis is concerned with a body of co-produced and mostly co-authored work, focussing on the experience of the "walks" and the "theatres" in so far as they best demonstrate a certain preoccupation with these concepts.