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Malcolm Whittaker
bio:
Malcolm Whittaker (b. XXXX) is a cis male from Sydney who works as an artist, writer, researcher and performer. He does this in both in solo pursuits and in collaborations with other artists and non-artists. His work is mostly made and executed through the engagement of participants and collaborators in the framing of play spaces that adopt social forms and rituals from popular culture and the everyday. His projects have taken the form of theatre and gallery situations, site-specific and public interventions, performance lectures, film shoots, phone calls, support groups, radio programs, elevator rides, teeth-brushing services, walks in the park, games of chess, gift shops, letters in the mail, library book borrowing, and the digging of holes in the dirt. He has made and presented work extensively across Australia, as well as in the UK and Finland.
statement:
For about ten years now, I have been pushing my luck under the guise of an ‘artist’ producing ‘art’. Increasingly of late, the frame of this guise has somewhat dropped away and my aim is for the ‘things I do as art’ to reintegrate with the processes of everyday life and everyday living. To do this, I have developed an artistic practice of ‘playing-with’ social forms, in a way that maintains a sense of integrity and consistency with that source form, and creates an art/not-art simultaneity within the art project produced. The resultant politics at play between ‘art’ and ‘life’ was a focus within the PhD I recently completed at the University of Wollongong. My practice-based PhD involved researching through my project ‘Ignoramus Anonymous’, which took the form of support group meetings for ignorance.
