Dissertation Ideas

As I love learning and researching, I'm really quite excited about the first part of the dissertation (everything but the writing part). I've had an idea in mind for a while, that seems to have become even more relevant to my work at the moment. I'm really curious to start a genuine investigation of titles, and the information that artists choose to accompany and supplement their work. I have become increasingly puzzled by titles, and the decisions behind the names that artists choose and whether this is important to experiencing the work or otherwise. Similar to musicians and groups naming their songs, is naming a work most often a summary of what the work is about? A straightforward matter of whattheme of motif or thought occurs most potently in the piece, or do artists use titles in a more ambiguous way to allow personal interpretations. I would like to learn about the history of titling artworks - it seems as if artworks and paintings have always have always been given names - but was this always by the artist or by other people through convenience.

I plan to look at Cornelia Parker's use of titles (and research whether anyone else uses titles in the same way) as they are very much a part of the work itself. Perhaps, through looking at many different artist and accumulating a survey of artists and titles I can start to catergorise the ways in which titles are used or decided upon.

I am a little concerned that this is too broad a topic to attempt. In order to work out how artists use titles I would need to thoroughly investigate and understand an awful lot of works. In my tutorial with Andy Webster, he also expressed concern that there might not be much written on the topic, which would make it a lot harder.

Andy suggested tat I attempt a less conventional format for my dissertation instead of a standard critical essay. He thought that a catalogue might work well with the themes I am looking at 0 perhaps presenting different exhibition catalogues (that I have written) as a way of exploring how writing accompanies artworks, perhaps even devising entirely different explanations to artworks.