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BA and MA students can specialise OR work between disciplines using hybrid or mixed-media approaches. The links below will show you other different types of work.

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Dissertation - BA Fine Art

The Value of Vertigo
A study of precariousness in art and philosophy

by Rhona Flint, 04/03/2003

Introduction

The simplest cause of vertigo is some mechanical disturbance of the body affecting the fluid in the internal ear; such as that produced by moving in a swing with eyes shut ... or a sudden fall. (Black's Medical Dictionary, 1987, p.723)

The occasional disorientation that we experience as a vertiginous feeling is so common that it could be an intrinsic part of the human condition, it is only classed as a medical complaint when distressingly frequent or prolonged. The sensation of vertigo accompanies a vulnerable awareness of height, or a fall, and falling is a universal metaphor: falling in love, falling from grace, the fall of the Roman Empire, the biblical definition of our world as ‘after the Fall’. The hidden implication is that there is something gained as well as lost by
falling; a lover, a new era, even the manifest world itself – in other words, a possibility; what Sartre called the ‘vertigo of possibility’(1969, pp.29-32).

The loss of balance and anxiety of possibility incurred as vertigo is inseparable from notions of height/weightlessness and depth/gravity. This dissertation will move into a far orbit from the medical definition to explore these notions as revealed in certain artworks and philosophical thought. Although the state of vertigo appears to be universal and a historical, I propose that our perception of depth/weightlessness has altered in three stages that can be observed both psychologically and socio-historically through art. It will be argued that there has been a shift from an emphasis on the ‘highest’, a
‘tower’ principle emblematic of the Renaissance, to a ‘bridge’ principle emerging in the Baroque, interpreted as Leibniz’s catenary, to a ‘ground zero’ principle of the Postmodern translating as Deleuze’s deterritorialization. The stages are not exclusive, as the art will reveal, but a tendency can be seen nevertheless. Through the examples of art within these classifications my enquiry is into the value of precariousness, and the aim is to show that it can be equated with what Robert Pirsig termed ‘dynamic quality’ (Lila, 1991).

The Value of Vertigo
A study of precariousness in art and philosophy

Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Works referred to in text